


Sequelae

by aeraecura



Series: Generation Loss [2]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, I've been waiting to use this godawful pun of a title for two years, Post-Undertale Neutral Route - Near Genocide Ending, goes without saying but you'll really need to read my previous fic first, low-key mood whiplash, more tags as they become relevant, suicidal thoughts (kinda), the mildest of body horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18737971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeraecura/pseuds/aeraecura
Summary: The human that nearly destroyed the Underground is gone. Undyne, Sans, and a completely inconsequential pair of siblings have been given second chances at life—or something like it. Now what..?





	1. Onryō

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _(But I saw the Bering Strait and the Golden Gate / in silent suspension of their golden age / and you can barely tell, if I guard it well / where I have been, and seen / pristine, unfelled)_ [[X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvEc3wVQvpE)]

Now that half of Gerson's customer base was dust and the rest had fled to the capital, business was getting to be downright dismal. Whole days went by without any customers, unless you counted the occasional lost Temmie that wandered in after forgetting where she lived.

He never considered closing the shop. It gave him something to do with his time, an excuse to get out of that stuffy old house for him and his guest both. She didn't say much when he first invited her—all right, more like he  _told_ her—to tag along, but he left, and she followed. He figured it might do her some good to help push around boxes and sort through old junk instead of staring at the wall for hours on end. At the very least, she could stare at a different wall for a change.

It helped, a little, maybe. There was no special moment where her old self came back out, nothing like that, but there were little flickers of  _somebody_ in there. She started talking again, some days, which he thought was a good sign. And if ever there was an expert on luring monsters out of their shells, it would be him, now wouldn't it?

Bah. Maybe if she was another turtle, and supposed to have a shell, it might have been that easy...

 

* * *

With so few monsters passing by the shop, the ones that did come in seemed especially noisy. Or maybe they really were just that loud, since even _he_ could hear 'em before they came in.

"Oooh, look at these!" squealed one kid, twisting her head all around to try and see through a battered old pair of glasses with swirly lenses. Her friend, an alligator with a mess of blonde curls, looked up from the tea box in her hands.

"Catty, those are basically—"

"MEGA cute?"

"—MEGA nerdy?"

“BRATTY!”

The one named Bratty, the alligator, cracked her gum. “What kind of a friend would I be if I wasn’t, like, completely truthful?”

“…Hey, what do YOU think?”

“…Yeah, what DO you think?”

They turned to a third monster, who'd been busy trying to light up a cigarette with fire magic. "Huh? Uh..." His eyes darted around, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Mostly ‘cause he was a long-tailed cat. “They’re… literally just weird-looking old glasses???”

Off went the weird-looking old glasses. “Bratty, you’re both like BREAKING my HEART.”

“Hey, I never said they were—”

“BREAKING.”

“—like…”

“MY HEART.”

“Not-cute or anything…”

“…”

“…”

On went the weird-looking old glasses. “…So, do you guys wanna get milkshakes later?”

“Ugh… can we not go to Grillbby’s? Snowdin is way too creepy, and that bunny girl’s TOTALLY gonna be—”

“Oooooh, wasn’t she the one that was like—”

“…a huge downer? She keeps posting on UnderNet about how this guy that she liked disappeared, so he’s totally… you know…”

“…Ohhhhh.”

“…Yeaaah.”

“That’s, like, a downer.”

“A WICKED downer.”

The alligator cracked her gum even louder than before.

“…”

“…”

The girl-cat stuck out her claws to inspect her nail polish. “…Ugh. Just talking about that stuff is, like, bad vibes.”

“Definitely.”

“SUPER bad vibes.”

“The WORST vibes.”

She bounced to her feet. “Hey, wait!!! We SO should invite her along anyway, then we could have, like—”

“A fourth wheel?”

“—a double DOUBLE date!!!”

“(This was a date?!?!)”

“…Ooooh, maybe that would cheer her up?”

“And we could totally set them up!!!”

“…Catty… I thought YOU thought Burgerpants was cute?”

The other cat’s fur poofed out as he nearly swallowed his cigarette.

“Hgggkk… you guys actually… Wait, that’s not my real name—!”

“Sharing is caring, Bratty! SHARING IS CARING!!!”

“UHHHH?!”

(In less than a minute, they said all that. Did monsters ever talk so fast when Gerson was a kid? He was half-deaf, now, but there was no way even his younger self coulda kept up.)

By the time the kids left, the first cat was still wearing those old glasses, the alligator was furiously typing something into her cell phone, and the second cat was puffing away on his cigarette as he groused about vacation time. Gerson's ears rang.

At the back of the store, from the top of a big crate, came a raspy cough.

“Smells like... freaking... catnip. _Blegh_.”

If he were the paranoid type, he might've worried that he'd finally gone loopy over these past couple of weeks, ever since his "guest" showed up on his doorstep, naked and melted around the edges and gibbering to somebody that wasn't him. She could hardly limp three steps before losing her balance or tiring out, yet she somehow managed to vanish the instant another monster came along. The possibility of her being a hallucination didn't much bother him, since if she was real, she was real, and if she wasn't, well, he might as well keep behaving otherwise, since there was nothing he could do about it... though that would be real embarrassing, now wouldn't it? Finding out that she was nothing more than a senile old turtle's imaginary friend,  _after_ he'd already sent that note to the queen... wah hah!

“You coulda kicked him out before he lit up.” Gerson dropped a handful of change in the till. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.”

Undyne reached through a gap in the crate's lid and pulled out an artifact, a rounded glass whatsit that sent out green sparkles in the light. Some of 'em were just worthless baubles collected during his adventuring days, but the mystical ones tended to open locked doors, do funny things to your stats, or just up and explode if you arranged them in the wrong order... or the right one, if you were in the right mood. Hell if he could remember which ones were which, though.

"Don't... wanna... let them see," she said, coating the glass orb with slime as she rolled it from hand to the other. Like a bar of soap, it jumped from her hands and dropped back into the crate. There was a sharp  _crack_ and a puff of smoke, which was less reminiscent of soap. It also smelled like green apple pie.

"Huh, so that's what that one did," Gerson said. Undyne grimaced apologetically.

"...Anyway, c'mon now," he went on. "The toughest monster in all the Underground is scared that some kids might think she looks funny?" He almost pointed out how much like a kid she sounded herself, since the last time she'd used that exact phrase, she was no more than 13 and all self-conscious about her scales changing color. But certain monsters got real touchy about that kind of thing, scale color or horns or what-have-you. He could never relate.

Undyne descended into a sullen silence, poking at something else in the crate. Bah, so much for trying to be sensitive.

"...Well, you know what I mean."

She burbled something under her breath.

"Eh? Whuzzat?"

From out of the crate, she managed to find a shard of the broken orb, no longer glowing. She tried to drop it back in, but it stuck to her hand until she scraped it off.

“Not… tough. Never… was.”

* * *

Undyne bent over the kitchen sink, twisting her neck to fit her head under the spout as she scrubbed at her hair. Gurgling, bubbling noises drifted up from the drain, the likes of which Gerson had never heard before.

"We have a tub, y'know." He picked up an echo flower, twisted off the blossom, and set the rest aside on a mound of leaves and broken stems. You could eat those parts too, but they weren't much good for sea tea. "...Or if you're concerned about the water bill, there might be a lake somewhere around here, if you look hard enough."

Expressionless, like she hadn't heard a thing, Undyne wrung out her hair, until the sleeves of her sweater were soaked and dripping from the stray drops of watery sludge. He could've made a fuss about the plumbing getting ruined, but her hair dripped everywhere even after she ruined all his towels trying to get it dry, just as she left slimy smudges on everything she touched, so he'd just accepted the mess in the same way he accepted the onset of back pain: better than the alternative.

He spun the tray of petals around to look for a bare spot on the foil, and found none. The echo flower in his hand whispered incomprehensibly. "You want some tea? Looks like we'll have some left over."

Undyne let her hair fall from her hand and hang limp like soggy seaweed against her shoulder.

"...Eh, Undyne?"

He gave her a minute, but got nothing back. It happened sometimes, she just sort of zoned out for no apparent reason, staring off at nothing.

...Bah. Having watched her grow up, it seemed like Gerson should've been able to guess at what she was thinking, but silence (meaningful or otherwise) was normally so rare from her that he didn't know how to interpret it. He pushed himself out of his chair with a grunt. "Well, suit yourself. I'm still making some."

Undyne slid just far enough out of the way for him to get to the sink and fill up the teapot, picking at the frayed ends of her hair, the stained spot on her sweater underneath.

"Ger...son." 

"Changed your mind?" he asked.

"Do... you. Remember. What the... surface... looks. Like."

"...Huh? The surface?"

Undyne nodded.

"The surface world... I remember it about as well as I remember most things, I suppose." He lit the stove with a bit of fire magic. It didn't come any more naturally to him than it did to that cat with the cigarette, but he'd had a whole lot more time to practice. "...But you might as well ask what a monster looks like."

Undyne scowled to herself, like she was trying real hard to remember something too. "Around... here. I. mean. Like... around... the moun...tain."

Gerson scratched his scalp beneath the pith helmet. Aside from some smart-aleck kids trying to find a quick shortcut to finishing their history homework, he hadn't had much reason to think about the surface in a long time. Nobody else was old enough to have even  _seen_ it, except the king. Plus old Fluffybuns' smarter half, but if Toriel was ever going to return, she would've done it by now. "Hmmm... lots of trees. Cedars, mainly, though if the humans kept cutting 'em down at the rate that we all were, there might not be so many left. Ebott's the biggest mountain around here, everybody knows that, and there were smaller ones off to the north... northwest, too. Anything more than that... I couldn't tell you. Doubt any human villages are still where they used to be."

"There's a... city," Undyne said. "And... the beach... is... past there."

"Nah, the humans had settlements all over, but nothing you'd consider a 'city' even by Underground standards. The ocean's that way, though, you're right. Did Asgore tell you about it?"

"...No."

The water bubbled. Undyne slid further out of the way so he could take down two mugs from the cupboard. 

"Just a guess, then?"

"No."

Gerson looked at her, tried to figure out if something in particular was bothering her. Was it that he'd mentioned Asgore? Back when she'd first reappeared, she'd kept rambling about hurting a monster, and how he needed to tell the king, and the guard, because she "wasn't going back". When she was a little calmer, he'd broken the news to her about Asgore and her troops, but then she'd just nodded sadly like she already knew. He didn't know what to make of it at the time, but pursuing the topic of what had happened to the Underground inevitably led to mentioning Alphys, and that had had, er, mixed results. When he first asked if she needed help from somebody, maybe that doctor friend of hers, the answer... it wasn't a yes.

Undyne limped to the table, grabbing into the edge to pull herself into the chair. Halfway sprawled out, halfway folded up, trying not to melt on the tray of flower petals which she hadn't been able to help him gather. He appreciated the thoughtfulness, even if she still got the table a little grubby.

"I remember. The way it. Was. When we... got... out." Undyne waited, as if for some kind of validation, but Gerson was too busy wondering if he'd missed something. "Don't... you?"

"I, er, can't say that I do. When was that?" he prompted, bringing over the two cups of tea.

Undyne let her head tip to one side, at the kind of angle that seemed like it should've cracked something, as she squinted into the cyan steam rising from her cup.

"Now. ...Not...  _now_ , but... it's... what was supposed to... happen. Frisk... broke the... barrier. Without killing... anybody. Even when we... tried... to kill. Them. Mostly... uh. Me. ...A... lot."

"...Hhehhh." Her expression twisted, her fingers squirmed like they had a mind separate from hers. Gerson waited.

"They... wanted to... be friends. Instead. And I didn't, but... they were... NICE... all the... time. Hardly... fought. Ever. And they... broke the... barrier. Some. Somehow. We got out, and... all the other humans... were scared of us at first, 'cause... they thought we'd... make them sick, after we... were gone so long. Or... s-some...thing. We... almost fought, but... when they saw... Frisk was okay, it... made them... not worry so much. And they... listened to them, and... they were willing to... make peace. It... took a long time, but we... all left... every...one... down here... went to the... surface. And, Frisk... nobody... knew who their... parents were... and they didn't... say. So Toriel... adopted Frisk... for real... later. And... Papyrus and Sans lived with... them."

Gerson slowly sipped his tea. This was the most that Undyne had ever said to him since that last day, when she came rushing into his shop in all her armor and tried to make him evacuate. And, all right, she was rambling about Toriel and humans and the surface, but it seemed like something of a breakthrough nonetheless.

"Frisk..." he said, carefully. "That was the human..?"

"Yeh. Yeah."

All righty, then. "And Sans, he was the one that you said that you..."

Undyne stopped to cough into her sleeve, breathing ragged. The tea might've helped, anything made with echo flowers was good for the throat, but she didn't touch it. "He... wasn't supposed to... he... ...every...thing that... happened, this... this time... ...The humans... figured out why... he's... so short, and... weak. Ost... ost... ...something. Don't know the... name. They knew how to help... Papyrus, he was... really happy... about that. They liked... Alphys... 'cause she was smart, and... knew how to... invent stuff they... needed. 'Cause they... messed up the air, a, a long time ago, and... I don't... know... that, either. But it... made her a heroine, to... them. Asgore wanted to... turn himself in, 'cause of the other... humans... but they, decided, not to... do any, anything. They liked him, too, and... they were really... curious... and about Toriel, too, and... you, too. 'Cause you're... uh. Really. Really old."

"Sounds about right, hah."

"Napstablook... got to be with their cousin, again, and he had the... show, he wanted... that... snowdrake kid, he... went back to his family... Toriel... got to be a teacher... I was one too. It was... pretty fun, but kinda boring, but... that was okay. Didn't. Want to... do anything... really dangerous, since... Alphys and I..."

Her voice cracked, and she coughed again, trying to catch her breath. It took longer this time.

"...Frisk... had this... power... that nobody... knew about. Everyone was happy, but they... went back to, when they... first fell. And instead of... making friends, they... killed... everyone instead. If they wanted, they could've just... killed... their mom, and... me, and... M, Mettaton... I guess. But they went back... erased everything that happened... everyone... ...they killed monsters that... never hurt them. Yuuya wasn't even... ...but... Frisk... still... went... back."

Undyne looked up at him, expectant. Having lost the thread of what she was talking about at least five minutes ago, Gerson had nothing to say. He clicked his beak. How long had she bottled up this... well, whatever-it-was? Some kind of nice dream.

"...Not... lying."

"I never called you a liar, little guppy."

"Or. Crazy."

"Well, it takes one to know one, eh?"

Undyne narrowed her eye, then deflated. She slumped in her chair, pressing her hands flat on the table. Her tea had to be cold by now. "Everything... after... even what I... did... ...can't tell Asgore, now, but... it's... all, 'cause... of Frisk. When they... come back... again... I'll... kill them," she whispered. "Make up... for it... then."

The sink quietly gurgled. Through the kitchen window, gems twinkled in the cave walls. Gerson took a long sip of his sea tea. 

Monsterkind had survived the human—Frisk, whatever their name really was—just as it had survived certain other humans who _wanted_ to do as they'd done, and hunger, before they were all able to figure out what crops would grow underground, and war, but...

"Hope it never has to come to that."

"I'll... kill... them. Get out. Of here. And find them. Whatever... it takes..." Undyne repeated to herself. Her hands curled into fists. "I'll... kill... them."


	2. Eucatastrophe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Are you going to Scarborough Fair? / (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme) / Remember me, to one who lives there / For once she was a true love of mine_

Light blinded Cabbage even before they'd opened their eyes; they rolled onto their belly to get away, squishing their whole upper body into the pillow against which they'd been propped up. Something in their side scraped painfully together as they moved, like a set of grinding teeth. A machine beeped.

Their vision adjusted. They were in a little room, white and windowless, in a bed with crisp sheets that looked green but smelled like bleach. Lemons and bleach. It made their throat hurt. Sounds droned outside, and Cabbage rested facedown as they listened, too groggy and stupid to think. Their whole body was stiff and sore, but the pillow was soft and it felt good to not move, so they halfway-dozed while whatever medicine had been keeping them asleep wore off. The vague noises outside ceased to be background static, and became a voice on an intercom, the squeak of a wheeled cart, claws and hooves on linoleum.

 _...Oh._ They thought.  _The hospital_.

Cabbage squirmed their way around to a sitting position, their range of motion limited by the magical bandages that encased their body like a cuirass. Green magic, like the kind that they themselves could produce, but stronger. And lemon-scented, for some reason. Experimentally, they pressed a hand into the bandages over their chest, watching the green light flicker across the white sheets. Their fingers tingled.

Beside their bed stood the source of the steady beeping, a tall metal box on a cart with a square screen on one side, angled away. Cabbage shuffled further down along the bed and leaned until they could see what was on the screen:

**99/15 HP**

—and the outlined shape of an inverted, pulsating heart.

Cabbage leaned back. This wasn't the first time they'd woken up in this place, so it didn't scare or surprise them as much as it otherwise might have, but the events that led up to them being here were all in a jumble. They remembered a dark laboratory filled with machines whose purpose they didn't understand, and a skeleton in a blue coat, and an Amalgamate... and the place past the forest in Snowdin, the RUINS. They'd gone there because the skeleton, Sans, told them they needed to find the queen, but they didn't think that they succeeded, because all they remembered was a yellow flower. A little yellow flower with a face. And after that...

Slowly, to avoid any further protest from their bandaged body, they reached back to touch the base of one wing. They found nothing but gauze and tape.

...Oh.

Cabbage was sitting stiffly upright, and as they lowered their hand, their posture didn't change; the bandages around their midsection wouldn't let them slouch or slump even if they'd tried. So they sat very still, listening to the SOUL monitor beep, and they were quiet. The inside of their head was quiet, too. All they thought was,  _oh_.

* * *

It seemed like the kind of twisted bargain a witch might offer in one of their stories—their lovely, sparkly wings, in exchange for their sibling's life. If you were selfless enough to make the right choice, in one of those stories, you'd get to have both of the things you wanted, and lose nothing. Cabbage would have done it, but they never had the chance. Unless sneaking into the queen's laboratory  _was_ their choice, and they'd wasted it by doing the wrong thing.

Monsters came and went; a spider in a nurse's scrubs, a maniacally cheerful doctor who was the source of the lemon-scented bandages. They prodded at Cabbage, examined their SOUL, answered anxious questions about their siblings' whereabouts. And they had their own questions about what happened in the RUINS; what attacked them, and how, and when. The queen wanted to know.

Cabbage said as much as they could, but trying to think of answers to these questions was like being near a too-bright light. They could only manage a few moments before it made them dizzy and confused, and they had to stop. Finally the doctor gave them a sad smile and touched their arm, and told them to go to sleep and not worry about it. They nodded mutely, the broken edges of their exoskeleton scraping with each breath.

 _Those_ thoughts came oozing back. In the past, Cabbage had found ways to distract themselves, reading or spending time around their brash, noisy friends, until they could almost believed they'd forgotten them, because those thoughts were like amber; if they sank into them for too long, they might never escape. But there were no books here, no friends to wait for them to wake up and then snap at them for letting themselves come to harm  _again_. Lace was lying comatose elsewhere in the hospital, surrounded by noise and light and strange monsters, and Reaper Bird was stuck at home with only a Loox and a small army of Froggits for company. Before today, they'd at least all been together, and Cabbage could fly. What good was a moth without wings? It wasn't a moth at all, just a weird, fuzzy bug.

 _Idiot_.  _Look what you did._

 _Idiot_.

 ** _Idiot_**.

When they weren't in a sleepy haze from the pain medicine, or staring at the wall and quietly hating themselves, Cabbage sometimes wondered about the queen and the fish Amalgamate she had hidden in her laboratory. They never did learn how long the Amalgamate had been there, and they could think of no good way to find out. They wondered if it was still there, floating in its tank, silent and alone. Reaper Bird spent a long time in the laboratory, and it was a bleak place, but it had the other Amalgamates for company. It was never  _alone_.

So maybe they'd misunderstood the doctor's questions. Maybe the queen knew what Cabbage had done, and where they were before they went into the RUINS, and she was testing them somehow. Waiting for a confession of guilt, after breaking into her laboratory with intentions of theft. But if the Amalgamate was a secret, wouldn't she  _want_ Cabbage to say nothing, even if staying quiet meant letting a monster languish alone..?

They almost told the doctor, but they could never quite bring themselves to do it. They were too tired and, had their own worries, and anyway, there was nothing useful they could do for the Amalgamate. The queen's friend Sans knew about it, so by the time Cabbage woke up in their hospital bed, he would have done something to help. By now, he would have  _had_ to do something about the Amalgamate. If Cabbage tried to get involved, days after the fact... they'd already lost their wings, maybe this time somebody would lose an arm or two, if they tried.

They said nothing. They'd already made one terrible mistake, but they could make up for it now by being quiet. Like a good knight. But they hoped, as they sat in their hospital bed, that the Amalgamate really did get out, somehow. They hoped it was happier than they were, wherever it was.

* * *

A thick bundle of plants with rumpled leaves and pink puffs of blossoms sat at Cabbage's bedside. The stems were too long for the little glass serving as a vase, and the plants stuck out at an awkward angle.

Considering why they were in the hospital, flowers seemed like a gift in slightly poor taste. Maybe one of their housemates sent it.  _You're gone! Thanks to that flower, we're free of you lunatics! FREEEEEE!_

The nurse took his hand away from their SOUL. With another set of arms he was taking down notes on whatever information he'd gained from it; Cabbage didn't listen whenever it was explained to them. They didn't know why they should. "Considering how you started out, your SOUL is healing pretty fast," the nurse remarked. With a third set of arms, he began to weave layers of sticky silk around their midsection to replace the old bandages.

Cabbage didn't care much about the state of their SOUL, but their  _heart_ was pounding like it wanted to run away.

"...Something wrong?"

"Errrrr." Cabbage gulped, and reminded themselves that they would make a terrible meal. Too small and fuzzy. "I... was... w-wondering about. Er. That. H-how long have they been there?"

"How long— oh, yeah!" The nurse finished wrapping Cabbage up and stepped away, and they breathed for the first time in several minutes, give or take a bit. "Yeah, that was from your friend."

"...My... friend."

They didn't have any friends. Maybe one of the Froggits really had left the flowers, then.

"The one with that goofy hat?" He motioned to indicate the size and general shape of said hat, and peeled off several sets of gloves, and put away the medical chart. "They were pretty quiet... but they brought this in and wanted to give it to, uh, to you I think. They left it up front while you were asleep this morning. There's a note."

Oh. Hmm. Not a Froggit, then. Cabbage tried to remember any such monster fitting that description. The mention of a hat evoked a sense of familiarity, but they'd also seen plenty of monsters with hats in their life, so it didn't really narrow anything down. It could've been anyone, up to and including three Froggits in a coat.

They let out an uncomfortable giggle, which was a mistake firstly because it hurt, and also because the nurse then looked up with an expectant gleam in all eight eyes. They wanted to hide under the sheet. Instead they reached over for the little makeshift vase, trying and failing to find some way to move that wouldn't send unpleasant twinges through their semi-healed exoskeleton.

There was a sparkly ribbon tied around the plants, and a folded square of paper with a hole punched in one corner, looped around the ribbon. Cabbage sniffed a flower, pinching a leaf until sap dripped from the broken edges. Milkweed? What were they, a little caterpillar again?

They unfolded the note. 

 

> ~~The doctor did not tell me much, when I~~
> 
> ~~went back to ask, but I was with the queen~~
> 
> ~~when we were in the RUINS. I never learned~~
> 
> ~~your name, or why you followed us, and I~~
> 
> ~~feel bad. I still don't know, but wish I did.~~
> 
> And now I'm babbling again. Oh no.
> 
> I know I shouldn't. Let me try again.
> 
> I read your cards, and looked at leaves, and now
> 
> I want to say: I think your luck will change.
> 
> Not soon, or now, I think, but if you wait...
> 
> ...Has this gone on too long? I always say
> 
> too much in notes, and don't know when to stop.
> 
> I'll try again... again??? I'm sorry that
> 
> you're hurt. I hope that you heal soon. That's all.
> 
> (I have siblings too.)

The writing started tiny and shrank down into gibberish as the paper ran out. Cabbage blinked.  _Luck_. Maybe this really was a tasteless prank.

Cabbage huffed, winced, then crumpled the note and tossed it aside.

The nurse laughed nervously, flashing his fangs. "Well, at least you got that out of it, huh? Those flowers?"

"...I suppose." They set aside the milkweed. Part of them wanted to throw  _that_ too, but then the nurse would have to clean up the broken glass, which would be unkind  _and_ extend the amount of time he had the be present.

After he left, Cabbage tried to go back to sleep. The cobweb bandages actually helped, and they weren't as sore as they'd been, but something nagged at them. They scooted laboriously over to retrieve the note, smoothed it out, and read it again, tapping out a one-two pattern with their fingers.  _One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two._

They scrunched up their face. They folded the note back up, still holding the sparkly ribbon. They fiddled with the ribbon, tapping their fingers against their knee. Then they plucked a handful of milkweed leaves, looked around to make sure that they were  _definitely_ alone, and crammed them into their mouth.

* * *

The magic bandages came off, and the doctor told Cabbage that they would have to start moving around to heal any further. Whether they healed or not, their wings wouldn't grow back and Lace wouldn't wake up, but getting devoured by a giant spider would be less agonizing than suffering through whatever a disappointed version of the doctor might sound like.  _You don't want to get any better? But we worked so hard to glue you back together. Don't you appreciate it? Not even a teeeeeeeensy tiny bit?_...Besides, they needed to see Lace.

Learning to navigate even a small room on two feet was like venturing into a different world, flattened into two dimensions that left them trapped on a single horizontal plane. It wasn't long before they could hobble around without becoming extremely closely acquainted with the floor, but if they wanted to see over the edge of their sibling's bedside, they had the drag a chair over from across the room and then clamber up. It was better than having to ask for help, but not by much.

Once they were there, they never knew what to say. The monitor by Lace's bedside remained steadily at  **2/2 HP** , but they weren't sure if their sibling could even hear them. Even if they knew what to say. Even if there was  _anything_ to say.  _I'm sorry that I let this happen? I'm sorry for not being a better sibling?_

Cabbage kicked their feet, perched at the edge of the chair. The ribbon from the note sparkled, wadded up and tangled around their fingers.  _Shine, shine._

They wondered if the human would have acted as they did, killing every monster they could find, if they understood how widely the effects of their actions would ripple out. Cabbage didn't know much about humans, but they'd read their stories, complicated ones and ones they told their children at bedtime when they wanted to impart some kind of moral. There was a story about a fox monster and a human prince searching for a magical bird, and a story about twins lost in the woods, and a story about an abused girl who fell down a well and was adopted by a witch. Humans liked stories, and they valued things like friendship and family and compassion, sort of, sometimes. Obviously they didn't like monsters outside of fairy tales, but... Cabbage didn't think they would want to be around somebody that had killed so many of  _anything_ , if they were a human. Unless humans,  _all_ humans, really, really,  _really_ hated monsters...

They didn't know, but as they sat with Lace, and fidgeted with a sparkly ribbon given to them by someone they'd never properly met, they felt sure that the human wouldn't have done what it did, if only it knew what monsters were like. If only.

* * *

Before, the doctor had told Cabbage they couldn't just lie in their bed and sleep all day; now they said they were making a mistake by leaving too soon. Cabbage listened politely, nodded, and ignored them.

By the time they reached home, they began to suspect that the doctor was right; the semi-healed seams in their exoskeleton screamed with pain until they wanted to curl up in a tiny ball and scream, too; Reaper Bird was literally and figuratively beside themselves, but their housemates stared, as if Cabbage hadn't been injured, but infected with something disfiguring and highly contagious. Cabbage ignored them, hugged Reaper Bird—wondering absently if they might get some horrible exotic malady from Amalgamate-goo leaching into their injuries—and limped of to the room they'd shared with Lace. Given that Reaper Bird somehow had even more reason to hate medical settings than the rest of their family, Cabbage wasn't sure how they would manage to entice their sibling back to the hospital even for the sake of seeing their youngest sibling, but if they waited too long... ...that would be... wrong. To leave them alone for too long.

Rummaging through the drawers for a new dress, ideally one that hadn't been stitched back together with cobwebs, Cabbage glanced up. The Froggits had all scattered, but one monster had followed them, and now loitered just outside.

"...Greetings, Aya," Cabbage said.

The Loox blinked at them and tried to find a safe path into the bedroom, but the floor was piled high with books, and, as Cabbage could attest, climbing over them was... not enjoyable. The Loox stayed where they were. "You're back, huh? You didn't tell anybody where you were goin', and then those doctors took, uhhhh, your sibling... so we all thought you... might've... yannow."

"No, I don't."

"Like. I heard ya went to the RUINS?"

Cabbage inspected a dress. If not for the bite marks around the sleeves—courtesy of Lace—it would be almost wearable. Except there were more marks around the collar, too. They sighed and put the dress back. Their body hurt. Their SOUL hurt. Everything hurt. Maybe the world was trying to send them a message. Maybe they should just...

"And that... some bad stuff happened."

"From whom did you hear this?"

"Ummmm. Around? These wizard guys... girls... whoever, Alphys asked them to help make new puzzles n' stuff with magic..." The Loox shrugged, tapping their claws together. "...and there was somethin' there. In the RUINS. That didn't want them there. And somebody following 'em, from outside, which, ummm, was you I guess probably."

How many people knew about what happened? Eurgh. Cabbage found a different dress wedged in the back of the drawer, old but good enough. They wished they still had their helmet to cover their face; without it, they felt terribly exposed. Speaking of which:

"Do you plan to watch while I undress, or..?"

"Do I... oh. Uh... uh...  _Oh_."

The Loox pattered back and yanked the door shut after them. Cabbage grit their teeth and began the uncomfortable task of trying to change with as little physical movement as possible—plain bandages weren't as good as the magical kind—but they had no more than a few seconds of relative peace before the Loox shouted through the door: " _Did that stuff all happen? Yannow, in the RUINS?_ "

"That is not a real word."

" _Huh?_ "

"N-never mind." At the last moment, Cabbage remembered the ribbon and searched the pockets of their old dress until they found it. Not certain what else to do with it, but not wanting to leave it behind, they tied it around one antenna. It didn't make them feel particularly cute. "It's— it is true. More or less."

Reaper Bird made an electronic-sounding screech from another room as Cabbage clambered their way past the books and all but fell out of their room. They brushed themselves off, already snapping at the Loox in their head for laughing at them. But the Loox didn't laugh.

"Was it... uh... really Chara?"

" _What?_ " Cabbage turned too sharply and doubled over, which just made it worse. "N-no, it... I don't know." They waved the Loox away when they tried to grab their arm. "Some... some sort of flower monster?"

"Uhhhh... you, you, you still kinda look... kinda... uh... like you shouldn't, uh... are you even s'posed to be here yet?"

"I h-have library books to return."

"If... you say so, I, uhhh... guess." The Loox glanced around. "We coulda done that for you. If you, uhhhh, if you wanted." They almost sounded concerned. Cabbage wasn't sure why. They'd never given them any _reason_ to be concerned about their well-being.

"SThodReoiimobberoitdRiunbbmeit'bs ahersse," Reaper Bird said. As their voices trailed off into static, there was a knock at the front door.

"Uhhh... should I...?"

Cabbage shook their head, forcing themselves to straighten up. "I will answer it."

Reaper Bird gurgled again as Cabbage approached the door; their voices sounded close, but it seemed they were hiding somewhere out of sight. Cabbage sighed. Unless the person at the door was the queen herself, here to deliver a whole bottle of, what was it named, Determination, they were not going to enjoy this any more than they'd enjoyed being interrogated by a monster who they'd mostly ignored for the past several months. A mistake, perhaps; if it was possible to go back and change things, maybe they would have tried harder to be friendly. It would have been the nicer thing to do. But, well, now it was too late. For a lot of things.

_Oh, well..._

They answered the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @life pls stop getting in the way so I can actually write.  
> Anyway, next chapter will be considerably less bleak than, uh, most of what came before it, if you can believe that.


	3. Alternating Current

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"You must answer me questions nine / sing, ninety-nine and ninety / to see if you're God’s or one of mine / and who is the weaver's bonny?"_   
>    
>  _"What is whiter than the milk? / sing, ninety-nine and ninety / and what is softer than the silk? / and who is the weaver's bonny?"_

For such a dreaded condition, Falling Down was a boring way to die.

Funny. Lace had always been afraid of everything a monster could possibly think to be afraid of—bullies from school and mercenaries from the edges of the city and loud noises and deep water and fires and horrible diseases and the possibility of the Core exploding, and the human coming back and murdering them, or worse, murdering everyone  _except_ them, leaving them to rot alone in a pit of dust. But now they were completely helpless, immobile, and dying, and they weren't scared at all. Just  _bored_. At least if the human killed them, it would all be over in an instant.

Cabbage would scold them if they knew they were thinking these morbid thoughts. There'd been a time when they understood each other perfectly, when they both had all the same fears. But somehow, after the human killed all their friends and all the monsters who could protect them, Asgore and Undyne and the entire royal guard, Cabbage stopped being afraid. And Lace... didn't. So now, here they both were. One of them was doomed, and one of them wasn't. Maybe Cabbage had the right idea all along.

Their older siblings came and went. Cabbage kept pushing piles of books around and noisily leafing through them and trying to use green magic on Lace, while Reaper Bird hovered over the bed and gibbered with three voices. Cabbage went out and didn't come back, and in the quiet they left behind, Lace could hear the other monsters that lived in their house all nervously murmuring. Lace would have shuddered if they could.

Reaper Bird gurgled and hummed somewhere nearby. Lace relaxed a little.

They wondered where their other sibling had gone. It seemed like they were trying to get help, but Lace didn't know where they thought they could find it. Monsters always died once they Fell Down. Except Reaper Bird and the slushy snow lady and those other monsters, but they were special cases. Alphys wasn't going to bother helping anyone like  _Lace_. She had better ways to spend her time.

The door squeaked like someone was looking in, but Reaper Bird said something that sounded like  _go away_  and  _don't push it_  and a frog's croak. The other monster left.

Lace wished they could thank them, or say they were sorry. They'd always caused problems for everyone, breaking things and needing too much attention and being even worse at talking than Reaper Bird, and now there was  _this_.

Eventually, even being angry at themselves got old. They wished they could read a book, even one of Cabbage's horrible doorstoppers. They would go back to school, _gladly_ , just for a chance to do anything at all. They couldn't even remember what day it was, or how much time had passed since they first realized that they couldn't move. Cabbage still hadn't come home. Where did their sibling go? They liked having Reaper Bird with them, but if they left then  _both_  of their siblings would be gone and they would be alone with the frogs in their house, unable to move or run away or fly... not that it would've mattered, if they were just going to die soon anyway, one way or another.

Lace waited. There wasn't anything for them to do except wait, until night fell and the house went quiet and the world went soft and dreamy around the edges. Their big sibling never came back.

* * *

Pinch.

A needle. Someone's arm. Whose? Fuzzy. The arm felt cool and damp where the needle had gone in. Something swabbed over it, like a tongue. A sharp scent. Disinfectant? Definitely not a tongue. Hopefully.

The arm tingled. Pins and needles. Mostly needles. The place where the needle had gone in now radiated a phantom heat, a tingling sensation that crawled down to the fingertips and up to the shoulder and throughout the rest of the body. Their weakened SOUL thudded, and almost hurt, like something was burrowing inside it, something  _alive_ , but there wasn't time to be horrified by the thought because then nothing hurt and their SOUL just felt warm too, warm and strong. Even if it had hurt, that wouldn't have mattered, even if it was damaged—even if it was supposed to die, it wasn't going to break. It wanted to live. More than they'd ever wanted anything,  _they_ wanted to live, wanted to go on existing, wanted to... to... to...

* * *

Lace opened their eyes.

Panic flooded through them when they didn't recognize their surroundings, but then the warmth in their SOUL sent out soft tendrils all through their body, whispering reassurances and erasing the chill of fear before it could take hold. Calm now, they looked dreamily around, though there wasn't much to take in. A ceiling, and walls, and yellowish light spilling in from outside. It was nice and dim, this little room.

Their exoskeleton practically creaked from disuse as they turned their head. A monster had pulled up a chair to their bedside and fallen asleep there, fuzzy head pillowed on one arm. Lace smiled at their big sibling, waited for them to notice what had just changed, but Cabbage snored on, oblivious. Lace swallowed, the soothing sense of well-being in their SOUL dimming for an instant. "um." They tried to whisper. "um." Their mouth moved and air passed through their throat, but if any noise escaped, Cabbage didn't hear it. "...uh?"

That wasn't going to work. Lace tried to sit up.  _Tried_ , except that all they had to do was think about wanting to move, and then they were upright, their paper gown crinkling. Their wings felt stiff from being folded in one position for too long, but they just rustled them and rolled their shoulders and then they felt fine,  _better_  than fine. They went to scratch one antenna and noticed a thin plastic tube taped to their hand, which they promptly forgot as they crawled to the edge of the bed. They giggled silently.

Lace rested their hands on the railing at the side of the bed, planning to tap on it until their sleepy sibling finally noticed, but they changed their mind at the last instant and pushed off instead, fluttering their wings. Once.  _Once_ , except that then they were hurtling toward their sibling like somebody had thrown them. They slammed into Cabbage and latched on tight while Cabbage screeched in terror and then screeched louder as they bounced off the arm of the chair and rolled together across the floor in a tangle of arms and legs and wings and tubes. Lace felt a painful twinge in their hand, and liquid trickling over their wrist, and then the steady electronic  _beep-beep-beep_ -ing from the machine at their bedside (which they hadn't even noticed until just then) screeched even louder than Cabbage:  ** _BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!_**

Lace squished their face into the front of Cabbage's dress and at the same time tried to cover their ears, while their sibling tried to struggle free, hyperventilating. The lights flicked on and clomping footsteps rushed in, and a gravelly voice was saying something but Lace couldn't pay attention to whatever was being said, the machine was too loud. Finally, the shrieking machine stopped. Lace's ears rang, and the dangling IV tube dripped clear liquid on the floor.

Cabbage, trying to shield their face, was babbling a panicked mantra of  _letgoletgoletgoletgo_. _letgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgo._  Lace let go and scooted away, confused, taking refuge in the shadowy spot under the chair while a weathered stone gargoyle looked down at them both.

"Cabbage?" he started to ask. "What have you... ...oh. My."

They made a wheezy sound. Lace peeked out from under the chair, and didn't know why the gargoyle was giving them shocked-and-then-happy kind of look, or who he even was, but it felt like he wasn't there to hurt him and even if he wanted to, he couldn't, so they waved hello. While they were looking upward, Cabbage gasped something and then pounced on them, yanking them into a tight hug. Nobody screamed, this time.

"You're  _awake!_ " Cabbage hugged Lace so hard that their arms were smushed into their sides. They knew without trying that they could've broken Cabbage's grip if they wanted to, but they didn't really need their arms right now, so they just rested their head on their big sibling's shoulder. "Th-they said that you might never... that it might, that even the queen didn't know if... ...but I KNEW you w-would..." they sniffled. "I knew it, I  _did_..."

The doctor knelt next to them, gemstone eyes glowing green with magic, though Lace wasn't sure why since they weren't hurt. They felt as far from hurt as possible, like nothing _could_ have hurt them, even if it tried.

…But their sibling wasn’t so lucky. Lace had not noticed at first, but as they looked down at their sibling's back, they couldn't see their wings, only bandages. They squirmed back and frowned up at their sibling, pointing around to the bandages. Cabbage just shook their head and smiled, a little wanly now, and patted Lace's head.

"Don't worry about that. I can tell you everything later, I promise, but it's all right now. It doesn't matter."

* * *

The doctors and nurses said it was  _just to be safe_ , and Cabbage kept reassuring them that they would leave the hospital any day now—even as they brought Lace their pajamas and notebook and more books than they could have read in a month—but Lace knew the real reason why they weren't allowed to go home. They'd been injected with Determination. Their oldest sibling was a big gooey moth-eyeball-frog-bird. They knew how this worked.

The day after they accidentally tackled Cabbage, another monster woke up, and then another, and then the doctor told them they would all be moving to their own floor of the hospital, along with a steady trickle of other monsters that were returning to life; beetles and crickets, and little birds, and a fluffy cloud, and a paper airplane, and a pair of white rats. The rats invited them to hang out in their room while the cloud and paper airplane chased each other around the ceilings, and Lace began to feel like they were in the middle of a giant sleepover. Except that nobody knew when they could go home, and there were nurses anxiously checking their SOULs ten times a day, and they were all banned from touching each other in case they turned unstable and melted together.

It was noisy, but Lace was never alone, which somewhat made up for only having one of their siblings around during visiting hours. Cabbage told them about the flower and how they'd lost their wings, and the story made Lace want to hate themselves for being the reason why their sibling got hurt. But their SOUL hummed in their chest, new and strong like it had been transplanted there from some other Lace, a better one, and  _that_  Lace wasn't sorry. It wasn't like they'd  _told_  Cabbage to go following after Alphys into the RUINS, and even if they had, well, it led to Alphys deciding to help save their life, using Determination nobody even knew she possessed. Now Lace was happy, as long as they didn't dwell too long on what they might look like by the time they got to go home, and Cabbage was (mostly) happy, and Reaper Bird was happy. Why should they feel bad? This was the good outcome. The best possible outcome.

Wasn’t it?

* * *

The queen visited as soon as she heard that they'd woken up.

Lace had taken refuge in the lab with Cabbage when the human attacked, but they never saw Alphys for long, or up close. She was too busy running in and out, herding along the stragglers who hadn't heard about the evacuation or were too scared to move, while Lace was, well,  _also_ too scared to move. They'd spent the whole time huddled with their sibling and waiting for it to be over, one way or the other.

Which meant that they'd never realized just how  _pretty_ she was.

Lace was so absorbed in staring at the queen's eyelashes that they barely noticed when she started speaking. "Can I sit here?"

A nurse hovered in the hallway, watching Alphys curiously before moving on. Lace nodded distantly, their belly filled with a funny fluttering feeling while Alphys pulled up the chair Cabbage had been sleeping in during their vigil.

"Your name is Lace, right?" she asked. "I've heard a lot about you from your sibling."

A lot? A lot of  _what?_  What had Cabbage said, and was it bad? How bad? Their older sibling could be kind of grouchy and they liked to complain about the tiniest things, but they wouldn't embarrass themselves in front of the queen if they could help it, so maybe Lace was safe. Or were they?

The collar of their pajamas squished between their teeth. Alphys gave them a funny look, which just made them more nervous, which made them bite down harder on the fuzzy fabric.

"...Um... is everything okay?"

They nodded, shrinking down shyly. Cabbage usually stepped in to rescue them at moments like these, but the doctor had already shooed them away for the evening. Avoiding her eyes, they felt around for their notebook. When they risked a glance up and realized she was still waiting for an answer, they held up their pen and pointed at the paper.

"Do you... just not like to talk very much?"

Lace shrugged. Alphys opened her mouth to say something, seemed to change her mind, then said instead: "...Okay! Um, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with writing or, um, whatever." She watched them turn to a new page, picking at her claw. "I just wanted to come meet you guys, since... well, in your case, you probably know way more about Determination than most people, because of Reaper Bird. But I wanted to give everyone a chance to ask about it, if they want, or... anything else, I guess."

The top of their pajamas felt cold and wet and clingy against their neck as they switched to chewing their pen cap. They wrote a question.

_am i going to be like r.b._

"I don't know how much you've been told about... everything. That led up to this." She was looking at her hands, wringing them in her lap like  _she_ was the one who had any reason to be nervous. "You'll probably hear about it from your friends, if you haven't already. But, basically I kind of made some... really bad choices. And I wanted to do everything I could to fix it now, wh-which includes making sure that you guys are all okay. And... also... I w-wanted to apologize to all of you."

The plastic cracked. Lace quietly spit out the pen cap and hid it behind their pillow, and scribbled out their question until there was nothing but an indented smear of blue ink across the page. Underneath, they drew a question mark, and turned the notebook around for Alphys to see.

"For... waiting so long to help you. I told everyone that I couldn't help, and I told your sibling that I couldn't, because I thought that it wasn't... um... it wasn't that I didn't WANT to, but... it was kind of complicated, and... p-probably you don't care at all, anyway, so my reasoning is beside the point. I waited longer than I should have, and it... almost ended really badly for you. It looks like it didn't, but it could have, and... I'm sorry. You deserve better than that. All of you do. I wish you had somebody better to help you, but until someone decides to take me out, y-you're kind of stuck with me, so... ahhh... here we are, eheheheh."

Her last few words came out in a rush, giggly and breathless, but her smile was hollow. Lace slid the collar of their pajamas (now ripping apart at the seam) back into their mouth.

Down the hall, a cricket chirped.

Alphys fidgeted. "A-anyway... I hope this wasn't weird, or, um... just me rambling. Even if I kind of was. S-so, just... if you need, ahh, help, or... if something's not okay, I want to... try and do whatever I can to help fix that, if it's possible. That makes sense, right?"

Why was the queen asking  _them_ if what she said had made sense? Lace didn't share their sibling's goofy fixation on knights and honor and royalty, but she was still the  _queen_. She was smarter than fifty Laces put together, and more important than they ever would be. And... she also just happened to have smooth, soft-looking yellow scales, the exact color they'd always imagined sunshine might have.

Lace nodded vigorously, until Alphys giggled and gave their head a pat. It always felt a little condescending when Cabbage did that, but now they felt a pang of disappointment when she took her hand away.

"I should let you rest now, since it's a little late," she apologized, as she got up to leave. Lace waved for her to stop, scribbling a new note and holding it up.

_thank you for saving my family._

Alphys smiled, for real this time, like Lace had just said something really wonderful. But her eyes were still tired, and looked just as tired after the smile faded. She picked at a scale on one hand.

"Just… one more thing,” she said. “Um. Think of it as, um, life advice, or something." She noticed what she was doing and quickly tugged her sleeve down, clasping her hands behind her back. "Don't... ever lie to people. Or, no—I mean... I guess... maybe there are times where you can't just blab about everything, like maybe if you NEED to keep something a secret, but... don’t hide the truth from people just because you're afraid of what they'll think. Especially if they're people you love. Because... it took me way too long to learn that lesson, and by the time I did, I'd already hurt two people I r-really really cared about. So. Uh. Don't do that."

* * *

As Lace rested in their cot that night, they heard the nurses whispering outside, in the hallway by the desk, far enough enough that they must have thought no one could hear them. They didn't sound happy. Lace didn't know why.

The next morning, they looked around at the other awakened monsters as if for the first time. They'd never noticed it, and they'd never thought about it, but most of the other monsters were only a few years older than Lace, and none were any bigger than the rats. All of them small, and light. The kinds of monsters, maybe, that would only need a little Determination to wake up. Unlike the stone monsters and dragons and other big monsters they’d seen on the upper floor, where all the comatose monsters slept.

* * *

Lace went home.

They hugged Reaper Bird and waved hello to Aya the Loox and gave the Froggits friendly pats on the head, leaving them mystified and slightly sticky. (Maybe touching Reaper Bird should have been the last thing they did.)

Afterward, Cabbage looked at them differently—like they had mutated into some other kind of monster. Lace studied themselves in the bathroom mirror, but apart from the ragged spots on their wings where the delicate chitin had partially dissolved into dust while they were unconscious, nothing looked different. They hadn’t melted. _Nobody_ melted, except for the fluffy cloud, who turned into a sad puddle for a day and then back into a happy cloud, and Lace was pretty sure that was normal.

By the time Lace was released from the hospital, Cabbage didn’t have to wear bandages anymore, and Alphys had already fulfilled her promise of making them a new pair of wings. She'd offered to make Cabbage's new wings look however they wanted—colorful and butterfly-like, or long and elegant like a dragonfly's wings, or even fluffy and feathery like a bird's—but they'd wanted wings that looked almost exactly like the old ones, sparkly and delicate, with only the straps holding them in place and their faintly reflective, metallic surface betraying the fact that Cabbage hadn't been born with them.

The two siblings sat perched on the roof of their home, watching as other monsters passed along the street below, unaware. Cabbage kept fluttering their wings, flaring them out and folding them, craning their neck to see. The not-quite-natural buzz from the battery pack made Lace want to do to it what they'd done to Cabbage's cell phone when it wouldn't stop ringing, but they thought Cabbage might be a little unhappy about that, so they resisted. Instead they tried to focus on their big sibling's happy chattering—about Alphys and how smart she was, and how the wings were supposed to be incredibly strong, and what they could all do together now that Lace was back, and—ugh—school. But always they seemed to circle back around to the queen.

Lace tapped their heels lightly against the shingles, thinking about their own meeting with Alphys. After a while, they scribbled out a question and slid their notebook over to Cabbage.

_is alphys ok?_

“That should be capitalized. And what do you mean?”

_is A ~~a~~ lphys ok? i met her too and she looked sad._

"When?"

 _hospital_.

"Many monsters have reason to feel sad. And... few of them have a more difficult job than hers."

_she said she hurt her friends. did they go away because they were mad? will they come back soon?_

"Er..." Cabbage stopped moving their new wings, to Lace’s relief. The hum of the monsters in the street below rose up to fill what would otherwise have been quiet. Maybe it was the Determination, or maybe their time in an eternally noisy hospital had left them desensitized, but the sound didn't stress Lace out anymore. "Perhaps... maybe. It, hm..."

Lace nibbled the corner of their notebook’s page. Cabbage shook their head.

"...Are you aware of what else was done with the Determination, before the queen chose to help us?"

Lace nodded, swallowing the strip of paper they held hamster-like in their cheek. They’d heard rumors from other monsters in the hospital, mostly older teenagers anxious to find out what they’d missed on something-net while they were comatose. Everyone seemed to  _sort of_ know what happened to Cabbage in the RUINS—much to their sibling’s embarrassment—even if the details were wrong. There was a skeleton named Sans who was friends with Alphys, but had disappeared, and even she said she didn’t know where he went. And there was another monster, whose life she’d saved with Determination, though she'd been careful to avoid saying who they were, or where they were.

_she helped her friend who fell down before anyone else. and her friend sans is missing._

"Sort of. I... believe." Cabbage looked away, clearing their throat. When they got uncomfortable, they either started talking even  _more_  like an old person, or they just got noisy and upset and flustered. There wasn’t much of an in-between. "I asked about his whereabouts, once. She said that... Undyne was the only monster that knows."

Lace tilted their head. Even  _they_ weren't so isolated that they didn't know about Undyne. They'd always thought she looked scary, but there were plenty of kids at their school who more or less aspired to  _be_ her when they grew up. She was gone now—not gone like Sans was gone, though, and not Fallen Down. The human killed her.

Cabbage lowered their voice, as if anyone could hear them up on the roof. "I did not ask what she meant, but... before then, when you had just Fallen Down, I saw... _a_ monster, down in the queen's laboratory. It... it did not look like anyone I recognized, and I was afraid to... I thought that Sans would help, so I... never had the  _chance_ to help, even if, if I _had_ realized..."

Lace had to prod their sibling in the ribs to make them look at their notebook.  _undynes alive?_

Cabbage instinctively twitched, but didn't comment on their grammar. "It... is possible. I assume she is no longer in the laboratory, but... I do not know anything else," they said. "...This goes without saying, but... this information should not be shared."

Lace looked down at the words they had written. Alphys had told them it wasn't good to lie or hide the truth, especially not to anyone they cared about. And here was their sibling, telling them to do the opposite. Did that rule work in the opposite direction—was it okay to hide something if they were  _told_ to do it? Not that they had much of an opportunity to tell anyone anything, when everything they "said" was through a notebook.

They scratched their antenna, and thought, and wrote one more question, one that seemed a little safer.

_do i NEED to go back to school...????_

* * *

So there it was. A dilemma with what seemed to Lace like a simple solution.

Undyne, who had been friends with Alphys, was supposedly alive somehow. Sans... well, no one said he was  _dead_ , but no one seemed to know where he was, except for Undyne, who was also unaccounted-for, and seemingly unaware that her friend Alphys was sad and lonely.

After everything the queen did to reunite Lace and their siblings, it seemed only fair that they should try to return the favor. Then she wouldn't be so lonely, and Undyne would be happier, probably, and Sans... well, they didn't know anything about him, but if they could find him, maybe they could help him, too. And then all three of them would be happy again. That seemed right—reuniting Alphys and her two friends in exchange for saving three siblings. Lace wasn't a very strong or smart or special sort of monster, even with Determination, but they thought they could accomplish that much.

All they had to do was find Undyne.


	4. Lacuna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I heard they had a space program / when they sing you can't hear, there's no air / sometimes I think I kinda like that and / other times I think I'm already there_ [[X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ4J-jvDAuQ)]

Now that they shared each other's memories, and now that enough time had passed for him to look back on them with some degree of objectivity, Sans had to give Undyne credit. Learning to signal to him whenever Alphys wasn't looking, then saying just enough to pique his interest and get him to open up to her, even if she couldn't get him to open the _tank_ and let her out, then going back and using her knowledge of the photo to get him into the lab more easily, then luring him close enough to grab... Sans couldn't tell if that had been her plan all along, or if she'd just brute-forced her way to a solution, but it was impressive work for a monster with a brain turned to mush. A really well-executed murder.

He felt a wave of malicious glee that wasn't his own.

_**How does it feel, knowing that I could outsmart you even THEN?** _

_feels fluffy,_ Sans thought back.

**_...What?_ **

_hey, speaking of which... want me to recite 'fluffy bunny goes to the park' again? i know how much you loved it last time._

With the mental equivalent of a growl, she disengaged, leaving Sans floating alone in the murky nowhere-space of their shared mind.

Out in the physical world where their body lived, Undyne was dragging a big crate out of storage in the back of Gerson's shop. As much as she used to hate sliding block puzzles and anything that resembled them, it was weirdly soothing to push boxes around. Gerson didn't mind that she avoided letting other monsters see her, and he didn't pressure her into any conversation topics deeper than  _what was in there again?_ or  _yep, that one goes back into storage_ , so she was free to zone out and work until her atrophied muscles ached. When she wasn't picking on Sans, or getting tortured by him, she liked to think about all the times she'd slaughtered Frisk.

If Sans wanted to make a power grab, now would be a good time. He tried to imagine what he'd do, if he managed to wrestle control away from Undyne. Scream for help? What would he even say?  _"Help, help, this is Undyne's inner skeleton speaking, get me outta here"?_

_**Go ahead and try it, Sans.** _

_yeah, yeah..._

**_I'll CRUSH you._ **

It was an empty threat. They both knew it.

Their thoughts overlapped, melded, and repelled each other like water and grease. Undyne shambled through Gerson's shop, staying close to the wall in case she forgot which way was up; Sans hid himself deep in their mind, crawled into an imaginary box and pulled the lid shut after him, and whispered the words to that dumb picture book about the bunny. It helped block out Undyne's daydreams of gutting their former friend.

* * *

Sans used to take pride in his ability to adapt, but this was... a lot. Even for him.

While Undyne stumbled around Waterfall in search of her childhood hero, Sans panicked. Kept wanting to scream for help like a little babybones. And that was pretty embarrassing, even if Undyne was the only person who could hear him.

But he got used to it. All she'd wanted was a shortcut out of her prison, and now that she was free, she wanted to be able to string a sentence together. She had no interest in snooping through memories of people and places she'd never seen; she just wanted his vocabulary. His knowledge of what her name was, and she was supposed to look like. Once Sans realized that, it got easier to cope with being an Amalgamate, or whatever the hell they'd become. Not easy. Just easier.

Now that he was calm enough to get all weird and contemplative, he wondered sometimes if this was how it felt to be... shattered. He still existed, by some generous definition of the word, but he was disembodied, detached from the world. He could think, he could observe the physical world, but he wasn't  _there_. He couldn't interact with anything, anyone, so the world just went right on without him. Was this..?

Whatever. Didn't matter. He was okay.

And there were some upsides to this new existence. Not having a physical body was a great excuse for doing nothing, and that was extra-convenient since he officially never needed to go into the workshop again.

Determination... that special power Frisk and the flower and Undyne all shared... that ability to change fate...

With somebody else's Determination flowing through him, Sans  _remembered_ now.

Undyne ignored him, most of the time. She slept, and stared at the wall, and tried to piece herself back together. And while his "partner" was busy with existing in the physical world, Sans dug through their memories of the _other_ world, the one where that photo had come from. The world that didn't exist anymore.

* * *

 _A girl with magenta pigtails was trying to carve swear words into a tree with her claws. Sans watched for a while, admiring her handiwork, before speaking up._ _"hey, did frisk pass by here recently?"_

_"Eh?" the girl grunted, digging a splinter out of her hand. "Yeah. They went that way."_

_"thanks."_

_Sans strolled across the playground, past the trees and the slide and the tetherball pole. The sky was that pale, unbroken gray that signaled rain and good napping weather; it was too late in the year for blooming flowers, but_ _the air was clean and crisp as only the air in Ebott could be. There were cities half a day's drive away where you still had to wear masks in the summer, and the Underground, well... even without smog, it was still literally underground._

_He found Frisk waiting at the swingset by the back fences, their sneakers dragging through the dirt and wood chips._

_"hey, kid, want some free candy?"_

_Frisk looked up at him through their shaggy bangs, the corner of their mouth twitching._

_"well, whatever. i guess trying to keep up with you qualifies as exercise." Sans plopped down on the swing next to Frisk. "what did you want to talk about, anyway?"_

_Frisk shrugged, kicking listlessly at the wood chips. Off at the other end of the playground, Pigtail Girl was still doing her thing. Sans hummed, watching the dry leaves tumble across the ground with the wind._

_"you seemed real anxious to leave as soon as undyne showed up this morning," he prompted. "you kinda just... bolted. are you upset with her?"_

_After a long pause to think, they shook their head. Sans had a feeling they weren't being completely truthful, but he let it go._

_"is something else bothering you? we don't_ have _to talk about it, but you did wake me up for this, so i'm assuming that you wanted to."_

_They nodded. There was something._

_"ok, go for it."_

_They took a deep breath._

_Sometimes, they said, it felt like Sans was their only true friend. That was why they didn't want to stick around long enough for Undyne to talk to them, or for their mom to ask where they were going. He was the only person they could trust. That was how it felt. Sometimes._

_"that's... kinda flattering, i guess, but c'mon, kid. papyrus adores you, he'd be heartbroken if he knew you'd said that. everyone—"_

_They hadn't finished._

_Sometimes, it felt like they couldn't even trust Sans. He was their only friend from the Underground who never hurt them, but he also never did anything to stop the ones who did. He'd made a... certain promise, to a certain monster... but he never kept it, no matter how much danger they were in._

_Frisk looked down at their feet, at the sneakers that seemed too big for their skinny, gangly legs. Their words sounded rehearsed_ _, like they'd been repeating in the kid's mind for days—which, maybe, they had. Sans thought back to how quiet they'd been lately, and how he'd shrugged it off as worry over the new school year, or something like that._

_Sans didn't know what to say. "have you... uh... really been keeping this bottled up all this time?" He scratched the back of his skull. "'cause that, that can't be healthy."_

_Frisk's mouth was a firm, flat line. Their hard expression reminded him a little of their mom, when she got annoyed._

_"that 'promise' stuff... i told you all about it back then. tori asked me, and i didn't have any idea that a human would ACTUALLY fall into the underground. then you came along, and, well, i didn't know you as well as i do now. i didn't know what kind of person you were, deep down, or if i could trust you."_

_They were a kid. They were still a kid, now._

_"yeah. a human kid. not that it— that isn't a strike against you, like, as a person, but realistically, it makes a difference," said Sans._ _He looked out across the yard to see if that girl was still around. Seemed like she'd left. He lowered his voice anyway. "...you had the power to hurt a lot of people, if you'd wanted. regardless of your age."_

_Frisk was quiet for a while. Raindrops spattered across the dirt while they mulled over his answer, their hands curled around the chains on the swing._

_Could he have killed them, like he'd said he would have if not for Toriel, back at the MTT resort?_ _He made it sound like it'd be easy, but..._

_"this is getting kinda morbid, don't you think?" Sans chuckled uneasily. "that was years ago..."_

_He was dodging the question. How strong was he?_

_"not very. heh heh... c'mon, kid. you know me, i'm no fighter," Sans said. Sheesh, if he'd known Frisk was planning on a cross-examination here, he would've stayed in bed. "though, if you're still mad about what i said, then, uh... sorry, i guess."_

_Frisk nodded, expression inscrutable. They pushed off the ground, swung a little, then dragged their feet to a stop._

_Just as they opened their mouth to speak, the front gate opened, and Papyrus strode into the playground, leading Yuuya along by the hand. Frisk's posture changed in an instant, pulling inward, timid and stiff like they were ten years old again. Sans let out a silent sigh of relief._

_"THERE YOU ARE!" Papyrus called out._

_It took Yuuya a minute longer to figure out what was going on—their pink goggle-glasses were all fogged up from the humidity—but then they let go of Papyrus' glove and scampered over as quickly as their little feet would go. "Hi Fif!" they lisped, falling against the human kid's leg and grabbing on with both pudgy arms._

_"hey, bro. kiddo."_

_"UNDYNE SAID SHE SAW YOU GOING THIS WAY. DID YOU GUYS COME TO THE PARK TO HELP WALK THE BABY?" Papyrus asked._

_Frisk smiled weakly at the toddler attached to their leg, then looked over to Sans for help. He scooped Yuuya up; they whined at first, then spotted his hoodie string and went after it like a tiny piranha. Poor kid was almost three and still teething. If they were anything like Undyne, that wasn't going to stop any time... well... ever._

_"isn't that your job, papyrus?" Sans asked. While he was still leaning in close to Frisk, he whispered: "if you'd rather be alone right now, you can bail out."_

_"INDEED! WHICH IS WHY I, AS THEIR SURROGATE MOTHER, DECIDED THAT THEY SHOULD EMBRACE THEIR AQUATIC HERITAGE AND PLAY IN THE RAIN TODAY!" Papyrus announced, then scratched his skull. "...WAIT, WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING AWAKE AT THIS HOUR, SANS???"_

_"well, i figure that the earlier i get up, the sooner i can take a nap."_

_"WOW! THAT'S BIZARRELY ALMOST RESPONSIBLE OF YOU, BROTHER! HOWEVER—"_

_Frisk gnawed the inside of their cheek, then jumped off the swing and walked off in the other direction, their head down. He heard the fence rattle._

_Yuuya peeked over his shoulder, his hoodie string stuffed in their mouth. "Mmmnph?"_

_"...HUH? WHERE ARE THEY GOING?"_

_"eh. home, maybe. wouldn't wanna catch a cold from the rain." Sans poked Yuuya's cheek to make them spit out the half of his hoodie string they'd bitten off. It didn't work. "...what were you about to say?"_

_Papyrus was definitely still concerned, but (gently) scolding his brother took priority over a lot of things. "I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT YOU DIDN'T TAKE YOUR MEDICINE THIS MORNING, SANS!"_

_"oh, yeah, right."_

_Papyrus huffed, putting his hands on his hip-bones. Toriel had pushed Sans into seeing some human doctors, but his brother was the one who took it upon himself to make sure Sans actually did was he was told, mostly._ _With an extra two hit points to his name than he'd had Underground, he couldn't complain too much._

_"HONESTLY, YOU'D FORGET YOUR OWN SKULL IF YOU DIDN'T HAVE ME HERE TO REMIND YOU OF THESE THINGS! IF YOU WANT YOUR BONES TO BE STRONG, YOU NEED TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF! THAT'S RULE NUMBER ONE OF BEING A GOOD SKELETON!"_

_"i mean. technically you could take perfect care of yourself and not be a skeleton. like, think of a slime monster."_

_"...MAYBE! SO BE LIKE A SLIME MONSTER AND TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR BONES! THAT'S RULE NUMBER TWO!"_

_"yeah, that makes sense." Sans set Yuuya back down. They started wobbling back over to Papyrus, then got distracted halfway and wandered off to stick their hands in a nearby mud puddle. "welp... guess i'd better head home, then, too."_

_"GOOD! AND MAKE SURE THAT FRISK ALSO—TINY MONSTER, NO, WAIT!"_

_Papyrus snatched Yuuya up. They giggled, spit out the string in their mouth, then switched to trying to gnaw on his scarf. Sans slid off his swing._

_"heh heh... yeah, ok. i'll look after them."_

* * *

_**That's it? They befriended everyone, broke the barrier, lived on the surface for all those years, THEN decided they were so mad at us for killing them that they turned into a murderous freak, went back in time, and tried to kill off monsterkind?** _

_...i don’t even know. i mean, we went home after that and talked about... socks, or something._

**_That's ridiculous._ **

_whaddya mean? socks are toe-tally important._

**_Yeah, Sans, nothing's more hilarious than a human murdering my baby for no reason._ **

_it isn't funny. i never said—_

**_How about when it killed your brother? Do you care about that? What about all the other kids? Did any of THEM matter?_ **

_i care._

_**Just like you said you cared about me, then left me to rot in Alphys' basement. But, hey, what does any of this matter, right? YOU were never in danger, because YOU never lifted a finger to stop them. And even when you did seek Frisk out in New Home, they never touched YOU.** _

_how is that my fault?_

**_Why didn't you try to stop them?_ **

_i thought they'd already stopped._

**_THEY KILLED EVERYONE. THEY KILLED ASGORE. THEY TOOK THE SOULS._ **

_that isn't what i... yeah. but i thought they'd... i thought they were gonna go back, maybe. it seemed like there was a turning point. there was nothing i could do._

**_That's an_**   _ **excuse.** _

_was i completely wrong? that one time, when you were trying to stop them... they could've killed you, but they didn't._

_**...So WHAT?** _

_they ALMOST killed you, then they stopped, and then you killed them. and they freaked out._

_**What the hell was I SUPPOSED to do? Just give up and die there and hope they randomly changed their mind and decided to be nice? Just because they hesitated before trying to kill ME, but not ANYBODY ELSE, just that ONCE? If they felt so bad, why didn't they actually stop? They could TIME TRAVEL. They could've fixed everything. They could've jumped off that bridge and been DONE with it. Or if they really were so mad about getting killed, back when they still acted like some softhearted little wimp, and they wanted revenge that badly, they could've only taken it out on the people who actually hurt them.**_

_yeah, i don't disagree with you._

**_You're trying to defend them. Traitor._ **

_i'm not defending them. nothing they did was morally justifiable._

**_Then what made you think they had some kind of change of heart before they got to Asgore? And even if they did regret what they did, how would that explain why they decided to take everything away from us in the first place?_ **

_i don't think that. i don't... i don't even know. i don't get what they did._

_**Frisk was our enemy all along. They always were, even though we never knew it. They lied to all of us.** _

_they did._

**_So stop trying to give them some... some kind of sympathetic motive._ **

_i'm furious at them, too._

**_You don't act like it._ **

_i am. i just... i don't even know anymore. you're probably right. their actions make no sense._

**_Even if they did..._ **

_...knowing the truth wouldn't bring anybody back._

**_No. It wouldn't._**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not really happy with this chapter and it's probably still got some glaring typos that I've missed, but it's at the point where I think you can at least see what I was going for, so I'm posting it. (Actually, that's just how it is with most of this fic...)
> 
> 11/01/19 NOTE: Went back and changed one line of dialogue because it contradicted some... stuff.


	5. Déraciné

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Snow is whiter than the milk / sing, ninety-nine and ninety / and down is softer than the silk / and I am the weaver’s bonny”_

Lace tore a page from their notebook and crushed it into a ball, bouncing it in their hand. Cabbage was so concerned with straightening the ribbon around their antenna that they paid no attention to what was happening behind them. Until the paper thwapped off their head, bounced between a pile of books, and rolled under the dresser.

"Ouch!" Cabbage rubbed the back of their head as if it really hurt. Grumbling, they snatched up the paper ball and looked at what was written inside. "...No, this is not a ' _date_ '!"

Lace smiled sweetly and held up their notebook so Cabbage could read its reflection. _!ЯAI⅃_

"I _told_ you, I am only planning to... go and meet someone who... was kind to me when I was recovering in the hospital. That is _not_ a _date_."

Cabbage saw the next paper ball coming and ducked. It bounced off the mirror and hit them anyway.

_that sounds like a date. yay cabbage!_

They wadded the note back up and tossed it aside. "It doesn't! What would you know about romance, anyway?"

Out of mercy—less for Cabbage and more for their notebook—Lace stopped tearing out pages, holding up their message instead.  _if u dont like them, why cant i come too?_

"I don't _like_ them. I can't like a person I've never met... even if their writing is nicer than yours," Cabbage sniffed. "Honestly, Lace. I don't know what's gotten into you..."

_is your new friend cute?_

"N—I _didn't—LACE!"_

Lace giggled silently and zipped out to the kitchen, leaving Cabbage to finish preening in peace. Two Froggits were trying to get a jar of peanut butter open, a process that involved one trying to hold it steady and the other biting at the lid. Lace would've offered to help, but the frogs seemed to find their new, friendly behavior even more mystifying than their big sibling did, as if they suspected Lace was trying to play some inexplicable trick on them.

Cabbage had left one of their books on the table. Lace turned to a random page.

 

> " _Rymenhild, that swete thing, / Wakede of hire swoghning. / 'Horn,' quath heo, 'wel sone / That schal beon idone. / Thu schalt beo dubbed knight / Are come seve night. / Have her this cuppe / And this ryng ther uppe / To Aylbrus the stuard, / And se he holde foreward. / Seie ich him biseche, / With loveliche speche, / That he adun falle / Bifore the king in halle, / And bidde the king aright / Dubbe thee to knighte. / With selver and with golde / Hit wurth him wel iyolde. / Crist him lene spede / Thin erende to bede.' / Horn tok his leve, / For hit was negh eve. / Athelbrus he soghte / And yaf him that he broghte, / And tolde him ful yare / Hu he hadde ifare, / And sede him his nede, / And bihet him his mede..._ "

Their eyes glazed over, and they wondered if it was possible to be illiterate and not realize they were illiterate. Their grades at school were okay, but maybe their teacher just went easy on them out of pity.

In the time it took to finish the rest of the page, Cabbage finally emerged from their room. Lace lowered the book just enough to peek over its edge.

"I'll return... later," they said, checking the title along the book's spine before nodding in approval. "At least you're doing _something_ positive with your time. Until I come back... just behave, won't you?"

Lace flashed a thumbs up.

As soon as Cabbage left, one of the Froggits croaked in dismay as the peanut butter rolled into the sink. Lace put down the book, retrieved the jar for the Froggits—earning a few croaks of confusion for their trouble—then hurried back to their room for their notebook. For days, they'd watched and waited for an opportunity like this; they sensed that Cabbage would find some reason to veto their plan if they told them about wanting to help Alphys, even if they had no true intentions of telling anyone about the queen's friends, which was what Cabbage had _actually_ said not to do.

With pen and paper back in their possession, Lace headed for the window, but the latch was glued shut with a sticky gray slime. They stuck their tongue out and scraped their hand clean on the wall.

"NRioWtbbithayodRouibytobit…othoi..i..nk.RiYwOhUbbi'eRtEreRidaobirbenit?gy,okugidoi?ng?" gurbled the three voices that belonged to Reaper Bird. Lace tried to untangle the words in their head, but made out the word _what_ plus a bunch of ribbiting and little else. Reaper Bird hovered behind them, bubbling and twisting their neck all around.

"WheRirWhbbait…etaarreeyyRoibbuoudit..?oignoging?" Reaper Bird demanded.

Lace flapped their hand and shook their head and raised a finger to their lips, _shh_. Instead of _shh_ -ing Reaper Bird jerked their wings and beeped. Lace wrapped their arms around their sibling's neck and kept shushing and hugging them; since their arms were occupied they couldn’t write, but that was fine since Reaper Bird had a hard time understanding what they wrote anyway.

Poor Reaper Bird. Lace understood why they'd be upset, with one sibling comatose and then two of them missing for so long, but Lace  _had_ to go out by themselves. Even if it made them a little anxious, it was part of the plan; the first rule of keeping any kind of secret was to make sure as few people knew about it as possible, and Reaper Bird was a lot of people now.

"YoUgu'hreLeoMetngoowtofhMemebe,riwenikow…rdoflidotitnlgesotwmetheriWop.nIg'mdnoof..?utmby.ouIrcpaentetll.”

“Shh. _Shhhh!_ ”

Lace planted a quick kiss on top of Reaper Bird’s beak, then let go before the personalities that didn't belong to their sibling got upset. They went back to the window and found it open, the slimy stuff dripping down over the glass.

Reaper Bird made a low noise, then sank into the shadows under the window. Lace waved goodbye, just in case their sibling was still watching. Then they clambered out and flew westward.

* * *

"sorry, but my neighbor... she's dead... she has been since last summer... when that human wanted to kill everyone..."

"..."

“so... if you wanted to talk to her... ..."

"..."

"... ... ..."

"..."

"this is... awkward... i hope it wasn't important..........."

"..."

"that makes it sound like i don’t think whatever you wanted to do was important, doesn’t it..."

"..."

"sorry... i didn't mean to hurt your feelings... it must be important to you, if you came all this way from the city..."

"..."

"ohhh... you were just still writing..."

Lace held up their notebook. _but she DOES live nearby?_

The ghost's eyes were all wobbly and watery like they were about to burst into tears, but they were already like that when Lace arrived, and Lace didn't think the ghost had any reason to be _that_ sad about feeding a herd of snails. They were cute snails.

Lace leaned between the fence posts to pat one on the shell while the ghost leaned to the side with them to see their message.

"she used to... you can't miss it... just follow the left path, from the pond. It's shaped like a fish."

Lace's arms were too short to reach the snail. They pulled back and flipped through their notebook for a page where they'd already written the one word they needed: _thanks!_

"i know you’re just saying that... i'm sorry i couldn't help, but she’s dead, so...................... thanks for saying thanks, i guess..........................................................."

Hmmmm. For a ghost living in a kingdom—queendom?—ruled by a monster who could magically revive the dying, they were _awfully_ convinced that their neighbor was gone forever. Nonetheless, Lace nodded in thanks. Once Undyne turned up, _she_ could be the one to tell the ghost they were mistaken.

Lace left the snail farm. Passing by the pond on the way to the house next door, they had the funny sensation of being watched, though they were sure they were alone. Actually, they'd had that odd feeling ever since they left home, but it was particularly strong near the pond. Odd.

They peeked in through the windows. True to the ghost's word, the interior was dark, and when Lace tapped their knuckles on the door, nobody answered. They flew back, examining the exterior of the house. Cluttered next to the doorstep was a messy pile of long-dead flowers, faded blue and brown-yellow, their petals crushed; under them were a few stubby, burnt candles. And a folded note, written on nicer paper than the kind Lace owned, pinned shut with a tiny plastic sword. Minus the little sword, the whole collection looked like the sort of things left over at the funerals which were so common early in the past summer, but they'd been arranged into something like a little shrine. And then just sort of... pushed aside. There were crushed bits of flower petals on the front step, like that was where everything had been originally been arranged, before somebody came along and decided they needed to get into the house. Somebody, but not Undyne. Unless that ghost was even more wrong than Lace thought.

They picked up the note and pulled one corner up to look inside; the handwriting was _awful_ , like it belonged to a little kid. Lace bit their lip and put the note back where they'd found it.

Backtracking toward the pond, they stopped to sniff the air. Sweet and lemony, like the fake candy flavor of cough syrup. In a wave, it brought back all the conflicting feelings of hiding in the secret lab, and being told _yes this is Rosy, but they're other people now, too, and they'll get upset if you use their old names_ , and clinging to Cabbage's dress while their sibling argued with their friends,  _begging_ them not to go to the Core, and sitting together in the restless muted buzz of monsters pacing or hugging dust jars in stupefied silence or trying to comfort the huddled flocks of crying kids—one of Undyne's last orders was for her guards to prioritize getting children to safety above looking for missing monsters, even if those monsters were their parents, and there were little kids _everywhere_ —and not knowing if it was okay to feel happy about having Reaper Bird-neé-Rosy back, or if it was bad, or if it even  _mattered_ since there was no guarantee that the human wouldn't just backtrack to Hotland once they were done killing Cabbage's friends and all the other strong monsters trying to stop them, and then...

...that last part... those fears didn't come to pass. And the human went away, and they wouldn't... they most  _likely_ wouldn't...

...Anyway, that lemon scent, there was a monster who smelled like that. The fish girl who Alphys bought back to life, along with Reaper Bird and the rest. Lace didn't know her, then or now, but they'd liked being near her when they were in the lab. She smelled nicer than the dust.

Lace gnawed their sleeve as they alighted at the edge of the pond, trying to focus on  _here_. The sparkle of their wings quivered over the dark water; their shadow seemed to fidget like a separate being from themselves. "um..?" they breathed, the sound more a hum in their thin chest than a spoken word. But nothing happened.

After they'd extended a hand to dip into the water, but before they made contact, Lace felt a tap on their shoulder, and jumped—they hadn't heard anyone come near, and the ghost couldn't have touched them. But there at their side stood a stubby, pale monster, looking down at them with two hollow eye holes set in a skull-like beaked face. Lace silently gasped and skittered back like the startled bug that they were, but the beaked monster didn't chase them. Or say anything. Or move.

Once Lace was a short distance from the pond, the beaked monster motion for them to stay where they were, then calmly popped its own head off and drop-kicked it into the water. Butterflies oozed from the stump of its neck; the head blinked serenely before sinking and vanishing, along with the monster's body. And the butterflies. A few drops of water splashed onto Lace's dress.

Lace stared.

Before the ripples in the water had subsided, a different face, one which lacked any features beyond numerous pointed teeth, popped up from the water, hissing softly in irritation. Actually _recognizing_ this one, Lace raised their hand in a hesitant little wave.

"...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..."

"...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..."

"...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?"

"...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" the Amalgamate sighed. Her voices rumbled up from the floor, from the water, from inside Lace's head. At such close proximity, they could taste the lemon scent. It made their tongue tingle. Maybe it was getting into their head and making them see things that didn't exist. Headless monsters and butterflies.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" 

"Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" 

Lace slowly inched closer to the pond again. Lemons... that was her name. No. Lemon Bread. They carefully wrote out a message and held up their notebook for her to see: _hello miss lemon bread! my name is lace and im looking for undyne have you seen her recently? or someone else that went in her house to look for her? also everyone is pretty in their own way :)_

The frilly fin on the Amalgamate's tail waved lazily just below the surface. She considered their question.

"Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left."

"Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left."

Gerson? The name brought to mind one of Cabbage's random dissertations on pre-war monster history, but it wasn't like Lace ever _listened_. They tilted their head.

"...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..."

"...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." Lemon Bread tried to clarify.

Okay. An old turtle with a really old-sounding name. That narrowed things down, a little, sort of. Lace wrote a new question: _where did he go?_

"That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..."

"That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..."

"Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?"

"Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?"

Lace shrugged noncommittally; not wanting to be mean to the fish girl, they wrote: _sorry, i'm looking for undyne. but i can come back later if you're lonely?_

Lemon Bread read their response and... smiled? She did _something_ with her face that involved several rows of teeth. Lace wasn't actually sure how an eyeless monster could read written messages, but she seemed to be doing just fine, and they were already trying not to think too much about their hallucination of a headless monster, so they decided not to worry about Lemon Bread either.

"That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..."

"That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." She murmured, and slipped underwater.

* * *

Lace wandered through Waterfall for the better part of an hour. They didn't know if it had always been so sparsely populated, or if an especially large number of monsters died there, or if everyone just decided to move away, but they saw almost no one.

They found a piano and played with it, pressing keys down with their hands until they heard a dog barking somewhere... behind the wall? They didn't know what to make of that, but it startled them into remembering what they were supposed to be doing. They flew away.

Eventually they found the shop. _A_ shop, anyway—with a wood sign hanging down and informing them that it was "CLOSED". They sighed, letting their antennae droop, and flew on.

They traveled for what seemed like a long, long time, along a straight path in a straight tunnel, empty and unmarked except for the blue gemstones in the wall. And a big gray door. Lace stopped to examine it, decided it probably didn't lead to where they were trying to go, and flew back the way they came. Luckily, a little onion-shaped monster happened to be passing by at that particular moment, allowing Lace to chase them down and ask for directions to Gerson's home. They'd been going in the right direction after all, funny enough, so they ended up turning right around and going back down the path they'd already started venturing down. The tunnel seemed shorter the second time Lace passed through it, and they didn't notice that door again. But, then, they weren't looking for it.

* * *

"Eh? You here to sell cookies or what?" asked the old turtle, in that kind of tone where Lace wasn't sure if he was serious or not, or mad or not.

They smiled nervously and kept holding the note out until he finally took it.

Gerson squinted at the small, cramped print, and to their dismay, did exactly what they hated more than anything, which was reading their note out loud. Slowly. And emphasizing all the wrong words. "'I'm looking for _Undyne_ and heard that you might... know where she is and... _may_ know where she is and/or what she is doing. _If_ you know, and do not mind, please help me find her.'"

Lace squirmed, hiding their face behind their notebook until he finished.

"...You're lookin for Undyne, kid?"

They nodded from behind their notebook.

"Hate to be the bearer of bad news, if you can call it 'news'... but she died. Months ago. Woulda thought that was common knowledge by now."

Lace pointed earnestly to the last sentence they'd written, crinkling the paper. Gerson scratched his chin.

"And that... doesn't seem like a problem to ya?"

And didn't the existence of Alphys and Determination seem like a _solution_? Blegh. Everyone in Waterfall was a pessimist.

Lace sighed, and in extra-big print, wrote: _why did you go in undynes house?_

"'Why _did_ you go in Un _dyne's_ house'," he read out, even more laboriously than before. Was he doing this on purpose? He was old. But also seemed like the sort of person who'd do it on purpose. "...Now who told you _that_?"

_went there. L.B. said you took things. that sounds like stealing but thats bad and i dont think youre bad so were you getting them for someone else? (undyne?)_

They shook out their wrist to keep their hand from cramping, then added: _i don't want to do anything bad either, i promise! i just want to talk to her and ask something only she'd know._

Gerson narrowed his one good eye at them. Lace nervously chewed their sleeve, but tried to stare back.

After a long minute—long enough for their old self to run away crying, if they'd even had the courage to knock on the door in the first place, and long enough to make the new Lace sweat—Gerson shook his head and chuckled. "...Wah hah! You're a real sleuth, aren'tcha, kid?"  He scratched his scalp beneath his hat, then stepped back into the house, pushing the door further open after him. "As it happens, there is somebody under this roof who could use a little company from somebody that ain't an old coot like me. If you're that set on paying a visit, I s'pose there's no harm in letting you come in and see her."

Lace nodded eagerly, their SOUL thrumming with determination and relief in equal measure. He led them inside; the lights in the front room were on, and the kitchen at the other side was a bright island; between them, the house was dim. Lace didn't mind, being a moth, though it seemed a little dangerous for an elderly monster without dark vision to leave his house like that. Not that they were any authority on how to survive into old age, considering what had almost happened to them...

Just outside what looked to be the living room, Gerson stopped. "Say... it slipped my mind 'til now... but you wouldn't happen to be from Snowdin, now wouldja?"

Lace tried to imagine what that had to do with anything, failed, and shook their head.

"Ah. Guess that's for the best," he said, and didn't elaborate further. "Anyhoo, she's in there. I dunno if you two ever knew each other, but I should warn you that she's... well...   _different_ now. You'll see what I mean. Not real fond of light or loud noises, either, so as much of a chatterbox as you are... I'd suggest ya keep it down to a dull roar. Wah hah hah!"

"..."

Lace went in.

When Cabbage first mentioned Undyne, they'd made it sound like she was completely unrecognizable. She always wore her knight armor— _plate_ armor, Cabbage would have said, like that made a difference—when she passed through New Home to see the king, so Lace couldn't judge whether their sibling was right or wrong or just making excuses, but they instantly understood what Gerson meant about her being _different_. The monster on the couch was curled up under a quilt like she was sleeping, but they could see that she wasn't. She just stared at the wall, silent and not exactly _there_. Like a monster who'd Fallen Down, almost.

Lace looked back to Gerson for reassurance, pulling up the collar of their dress and nibbling the fabric. He waved. _Go on_.

They perched on the arm of the couch and folded down their raggedy wings, their Determination not quite enough to keep the anxiety at bay. They'd been so concerned with looking for Undyne that they'd given little thought what they'd do once they'd found her. It didn't seem important at the time.

Pulling their collar higher over their face, Lace took a deep breath and whispered, "...um..?"

The windows didn't explode in a shower of broken glass, and the monster under the quilt didn't leap up and shake Lace and scream _HOW DARE YOU_. But she did turn her head to look at them, which made their throat tighten as surely as if her hands had closed around it.

"Wh..." She pushed herself up on her elbows, slow and groggy like she actually had been sleeping, and glanced over the back of the couch toward the kitchen, and Gerson. "...Where'd—" she coughed into her arm. The quilt, falling away from her shoulders, revealed a bulky, engulfing sweater with long sleeves, stained gray around the cuffs. "...Who're... you?"

Lace held up their notebook. Across the top of the page, in their very neatest print, they'd written: _Hello!!! My name is Lace. It's nice to meet you!_

Undyne's whole face was in shadow, save for one glowing pupil, narrow and feline. "...You... again."

Again? What did she... oh, that was right. Lace shook their head and fluttered their hands and tried to gesture, but without any good way to convey the concept of "siblings"—oh, how they wished they'd learned to sign—they went back to writing.

_you mean my sibling cabbage. its OK, we look alike!_

Undyne pushed her hair behind a stubby ear fin, and Lace caught a glimpse of an empty eye socket on her left side before her hair slipped right back down to where it had been. Having hair in one's face all the time seemed like it would be incredibly annoying, but Lace didn't have a ribbon like Cabbage's that they could offer. Judging by her guarded body posture, Lace wasn't sure Undyne would accept one, anyway.

"...What... 're you doing... here."

Though maybe less than thrilled about having a moth barging into her space—even if Gerson _did_ give them permission—she waited for Lace to finish writing their answer and offer their notebook, which she held with her sleeves scrunched into mittens around her hands so she wouldn't get the paper sticky.

While she read, Lace scooted closer so the sparkly sheen from their wings could provide some light. It was a little unnerving, if they thought too much about just _who_ they were with right now; some of their classmates would practically kill to meet Undyne. So they'd tried not to think about that part, and simply explained the situation as best they'd understood it: their sibling knew she was alive, and Alphys knew she was alive, but neither knew where Undyne had gone, which made the queen—with her gentle voice and yellow scales and long eyelashes—terribly sad. So what was a moth to do, but try and help find her missing friend?

(Okay, that wasn't _exactly_ what they'd written. But Alphys had _very_ pretty eyelashes.)

Undyne stared at the page for what felt like ages. "Al...phys... sent you... to... f...find... me," she slowly rasped.

Lace vigorously shook their head, pointing to themselves.

"It was... your... idea."

They nodded.

"...Why."

Lace frowned. They pointed to the paragraph they'd just written.

"No. I... meant... ...you know I'm..." she stopped to catch her breath. The ends of her hair dribbled goo; Lace pulled their notebook out of the way and hugged it. "...Dead... I'm... dead. Should... be... dead. Isn't... that..?"

_lots of people "should" be dead. like me! but alphys healed me and saved us + you did too. thats what they said, you fought the human so we could run away._

"Not... what I... meant." A spasm of pain flashed across what little of her face they could see, and she looked away from their notebook, to the window.

Lace poked her through the sweater to make her look at their response: _do you mean b/c you look different? thats OK too. its not gross or scary._ They meant what they wrote. She wasn't gross. Just sort of... sad and sickly-looking. And slimy—her clothes and the seat under her and the quilt bunched up on her lap were stained gray, and the dripping ends of her hair and ear fins gave a pretty strong hint at how that happened. But Reaper Bird was all gooey, too, so that was no big deal.

Undyne made a funny scratchy noise in her throat. Another cough? Or maybe a laugh? "Uh... th...anks..?"

Lace brightened.

"...Wa...it..." she said suspiciously. "What do you... mean, she... healed... you?"

_i fell down so she used determination to cure it._

Undyne stared down at the page while they wrote. "De...termin...ation... ...that's... that's the... the..."

Lace nodded, holding up their arm and pretending to poke a needle into it, their thumb pressing an imaginary plunger. Until that moment, Undyne had slowly begun to relax. Now she looked at them the way those Froggits always did now, except she was a lot more intimidating than any of  _them_.

"She... used... it."

Lace nodded again. They weren't sure why this seemed to disturb Undyne so much, so they started to explain.

_other monsters fell down too. we were in the hospital, she gave the determination to the doctors and told them how m_

"SHE _USED_ IT?!"

Undyne yanked the notebook from Lace's hands, holding it close to her face like the words might magically change. Lace clawed at the notebook, trying to grab it back, but a sick, weakened Undyne was still many times stronger than a Determined Lace; all they managed to do was rip the top page out, which pushed them over the edge from upset to panicked. _GIVE IT BACK_ , they wanted to demand, _GIVE IT BACK GIVE IT BACK GIVE IT BACK_ , but they couldn't and they needed their notebook to do that but they hadn't given it to her, she'd _taken_ it, and now they couldn't say anything and what if it got too dirty for them to write or she refused to give it back? Just like the bigger kids at school—how they used to grab Lace's notebook and laugh because there was nothing they could do except—except what?

Speaking was impossible. Writing was impossible. They couldn't just flee the house because she still had their notebook, and they couldn't ask Gerson for help because _she still had their notebook_. So Lace did the first and only thing they could think to do.

They bit Undyne.

Except, no, they only _tried_ to bite her. They grabbed her sleeve and buried their teeth into her wrist, but

 

 **[** **̦** **͔** **̤** **̊̋** **ͭ͆͂ͥ҉** **̜** **͙͖** **̪̳** **C** **ͥ** **̺̝** **A** **ͧͪ** **̱̮̼̐** **N** **͌** **̓̌** **͐** **̨̦̒** **͓** **̤̟̬̙̟** **'** **́** **͊ͧ** **̻̻̟̻̤** **͖** **T** **̒** **ͤ** **̓̔̽** **͂** **̪** **͎͍** **ͭͬͤ** **̿** **͇ͥ͗** **]** **̰̪̗̚**

that wasn't what happened. What  _really_ happened was that the room went all dark and fractured and their jaw snapped shut on empty air with a painful _clack_.

"The— _hell?!_ " Undyne jerked her arm back and shoved Lace away, sending them flying. And not the good kind of flying that involved wings.

As Lace cartwheeled across the room, they had just enough time to think something like, _if this doesn't kill me then Cabbage will_ before the wall rushed forward to meet them. And then there was no time left to think, so instead of thinking they twisted themselves around to get their hands and feet between themselves and the wall and pushed off just as they made contact, leaving a crack in the plaster and a few small scrapes and bruises on Lace, but sparing their head from taking the hit instead. Lace tumbled down, dizzy and disoriented but maybe the tiniest bit proud.

And landed softly into the arms of a short, stubby, headless monster.

"Wh—the _HELL?_ " Undyne snarled again, louder, giving voice to what Lace wouldn't have said themselves even if they could, but _felt_. A small swarm of butterflies writhed around the headless monster's neck and tickled Lace's nose.

Lace rolled out of the headless monster's arms and landed on the floor, swallowing a pained whimper when their knees hit the hard floor; the headless monster disintegrated, turned into more butterflies, and disappeared. Undyne was already on her feet, wobbling just the littlest bit as she faced... Reaper Bird?

" _Drdoino'tnbp'tbitockuconbthhiemtehetm!_ " Lace's big sibling buzzed, angrier than they had ever seen them since they came back.

"What— _is—_ _that_ —?!" Undyne choked out, and Lace could've answered but they _couldn't_ because she'd dropped their notebook somewhere. And they didn't have any time to look for it, because then Reaper Bird lunged at Undyne. With a crackle of electric-blue magic, she summoned a jagged, misshapen spear and she slashed at their sibling's neck, and Lace tried to rush forward to stop her but it was too late and

 

**[̟̎̾̾ͧ͋͞ ̴̜̯͙̦̹̩̱F̟̯ͧͮͬͭͭA̹̪͞I͂̿̄̾̓͏͉ͅL̺͎͔̬̽̔ͥ̄̉̃͜U̻̹̼͈̍ͭͭͬͅŘ̺̬̐Ĕ̱̬͔͕ ͍̗̭̼́͐ͣ̽̅̚͠ͅ]̤͊ͭ̃̓ͨ̄ ̷̣ͫ̆ ̠͇̻̹͔̘̟͊̈̄ ̜̯͔͇͇̄͌̑̍̍͘ ͉̲̒̿̀[̶̦̬̭̣̖̋͊̅ͧ̓ͫͯͅN̸͚̟Ö̮̫́ͤT̛͈̖͙̀ͫ̎Hͯ̽̈́̌̾͒͏̗I̩ͯ̏N͓G̱̲͔̼̻̭̱̉ ͗̚͏̗̰̻̤̦H̵͈͕̹̱͕̹̀̐A̵̺̪̳̹̒͗ͣ̓ͣͩͮP̘̺͈͉͈̀͗͊̍ͥ͘P̧̝̞̫̞̩̪̥͐̅̍̃E͕͍͙͇̥̠Ṇ͒ͯ̅͐͐̈Ẹ̬̓ͭ͆͂D̖̦ͬ͑͊̃̓ͩ̚]͖͎͊ͣ̊̋ͮ̈́̋ ̨̹̈̒ ͩ̀͐̓̐͒ ̒ ̝̘ͧͦͣ̔̎͜ ̱͉̱̗͊̍̂͒̅̈́̊ͅ ̣̝̲̩̰̀̾͐͐ͧ[ͨͮ̄̑ͣ͏̖̙̮̝͉̰D̜̬̳̻͚ͨ̏I̟̲͙͕̙̮D̺͖͙͇̎̓͞N̰̲̘̱͈͇̊͑̽͆'͎̟ͯ̑̓͐̑ͣT҉̥͇̫̫͕ ̰ͮ́ͩͥͩ͊͘W̜̬Õ̩̝̓ͧR̓̐K̤̭̦̹̓͆ͫͦͪ͊̕]̊̌͗͏̖͇͎̖**

it didn't matter anyway; her weapon harmlessly dissipated and Reaper Bird was floating right where they'd started out, as if they hadn't moved at all. They burbled in frustration and Undyne snarled back. Lace didn't really know what was going on and it made them want to cry; they didn't even know where their sibling had come from but now they were _fighting_ with Undyne and oh this was bad, bad, _bad_ , Cabbage really was going to kill them—!

"That's enough, you _both!_ "

The air hummed with more magic. The room turned green, and every sound except their own panicked breathing turned muffled. Lace rubbed their eyes and and tried to get up, but bumped their head on... green glass? No, something else. A little dome surrounded them, small enough for them to touch the roof with their fingertips, translucent and patterned with geometric shapes that evoked the shell of a turtle. Reaper Bird was trapped inside a second dome, making jittery little motions and squawking what sounded like mangled swear words.

Undyne, stuck under a third, glowing barrier, pounded against the inside without a spear or any magic, just with her hands. Cracks formed along its surface, but healed themselves with a wave from the old turtle. With his other hand, he held a glowing hammer, leaving the head resting on the floor and leaning on the handle like a walking stick.

 _"Undyne._ That's _enough_. While you're in my home, you won't..."

He stopped. Undyne stopped, too, wobbling back and either sitting or falling down on her butt, curling her arms over her head and pulling her knees into her chest. The room went dark again, despite being filled with green magic, and then she wasn't there.

Another gesture from Gerson, and the magic dissipated, including the hammer. Reaper Bird twitched and jerked, then slid over to Lace and nudged them. Lace shakily reached up to pat their beak, a little dazed, before their big sibling left their side and went off toward the couch. The scrapes on their palms were gone.

"You and your friend all right, kiddo?" Gerson scratched his head. "Guess I shoulda warned you, but... now I coulda sworn that I never saw them 'til now. My memory ain't THAT bad now, is it..?"

Lace pointed to where Undyne had been.

"Eh? Undyne? Yeah, that's a new trick of hers," he remarked. "...Though, I can't say she's done anything like THAT before."

They nodded, dropping their hand to their lap. Nothing Gerson said really registered in their mind, so they didn't know why they were nodding, except habit. It wasn't like he'd asked a question, and if he wanted to imply one, then Lace didn't know the answer. They didn't even know exactly what they'd done wrong. They thought they'd been doing the right thing. Except they weren't. And now Undyne was... they didn't even know where she could possibly be  _now_ , and Gerson sure wasn't going to tell them, even if they were brave or dumb enough to follow... they really had ruined everything. And they'd even forgotten to ask about her friend Sans while they'd had the chance...

Reaper Bird made a gentle burbling sound and slid Lace's notebook across the floor from where it had fallen. The cover was gone, and the pages were all crumpled, flecked with gray.

And that, somehow, was what made Lace finally burst into tears.

* * *

At a safe distance from Gerson's house, Lace lightly poked at Reaper Bird and scrunched up their face. The question they wanted to convey was _you've been following me this whole time?,_ but they didn't know how to express any of the elements of that question—especially that creepy headless magic attack _thing—_ and didn't feel like going back to the house for their lost pen. Or facing Gerson again. Ever.

"SoRrShrye's,iaLbuabbit...lly.ce," said Reaper Bird.

Lace made out the sound of their own name and the word " _she's_ " and not much else. They sighed. They were tired, and they couldn't say anything now, whether that was thanking their big sibling for trying to look after them, or asking just how badly they thought Lace had ruined things, or what Cabbage would think. So instead, they slid their arms around Reaper Bird's long, long neck, and buried their face in the damp scaly feather-things under their wing.

It wasn't quite the same as writing, but it got the message across.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story Lace attempts to read in this chapter is [a real Middle English romance](https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-king-horn) from the 1200s. To any 800-year old medieval poets who may be reading this note: you are now officially barred from accusing me of plagiarism. In my Undertale fanfic.
> 
> On a different note, it has come to my attention that the way I've been writing Reaper Bird's dialogue doesn't really match how it is ingame--if anything, it's the exact _reverse_ \--and I'm usually obsessive about accuracy to canon, buuuuut I don't feel like changing it at this point. So here we are!


	6. eh biens, continuons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Followed him out to the end of the pier / 'Don't come any closer,' he cried / 'I am afraid / of the man I'll become if I lay my / life down for a people who I don't even care for'. / Face to his face, I put my / hand into his and I tried to tell him, 'No, / I've seen His work upon the panes of cathedrals / in the sweat of the workers and the flight of the seagulls'."_ [[X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCMtGQxUlZA)]

The river was shallow but fast-moving, dotted by the slick edges of rocks above the waterline. Undyne jumped and landed wrong, the impact shooting up through her ankle and pitching her to one side. She threw herself to the next rock anyway, then the next, never stopping to regain her balance, daring her wobbly legs to fail her.

Which they did. Her clothes got soaked. They were already dripping with slime, so she didn't notice. She got up.

With the current swirling around her knees, Undyne lurched to the opposite shore and circled the cliff's edge, feeling her way into the cave behind the waterfall. Her muddy sweater squelched as she pressed her back to the wall and slid down. No conscious thought had led her there; all she knew was that she needed to get away from that house, _now_. Could've gone home instead? No, too far. Just had to get away. Had to...

...run away. From a little kid. A Whimsun and their pet bird-frog-thing. A _Whimsun_.

Undyne groaned, slamming her head back into the wall. Starbursts fizzled behind her eye and the world went foggy. "Fuck." she mumbled thickly. Damp tendrils of hair clung to her cheeks, glued in place with slime and condensation, tugging her fragile not-quite-scales with each word. Goo dribbled down to her jaw. " _Fuck._ "

Sans made the mental version of a wince; he still didn't know how to cope with physical pain. At least he couldn't die. This time.

_undyne, you gotta—chill, ok? just, uh, just take a minute to—_

_Shut_ _up_ , she thought back.

 _this isn't helping_.

_YOU'RE not helping._

_...forget this. i don't owe her anything_ , Sans thought to himself, which meant nothing since she still heard. When he reflected that this whole situation was actually kind of funny— _for a monster that used to teach, she's not great with kids, huh?_ —Undyne heard that, too.

She slumped over, webbed fingers tangling in her sticky hair, her knees pressing to her forehead. She considered flinging herself down the waterfall and taking Sans with her. Instead, she buried her fangs into her own hand, just as that moth kid had tried to do. Sans' thought process short-circuited, turned into a mental scream, and he fled to a some dark little corner of her mind. Her hand bled gray slime.

Stiffly, Undyne sat up. This wasn't such a bad spot to choose, actually; she used to come to this spot on her breaks, or when she was feeling stressed, and she'd meditate. Nobody else seemed to even know this spot existed.

Undyne closed her eye and leaned back into the wall, forcing her back to straighten. Loosely crossing her legs into a clumsy lotus pose, she visualized herself as a rock planted firmly in a riverbed. Her thoughts floated past, bobbing and bumping together, and drifted into the distance.

( _Ten years from "now", Yuuya studied for a math test with their human classmates, and Undyne thought about the surrealism of it all; if any one of these kids had been born earlier and fallen into the Underground, they would have become a figure of legend, a vessel for every monster's hopes and dreams, whose seventh SOUL would have granted Asgore the power to save monsterkind by destroying humanity, and their memory would have lived on forever in monster history—but here they were all nobodies, and the power of a human SOUL meant nothing; with twelve billion other humans running around on the surface, no one in Ebott had noticed or cared when Frisk disappeared into the mountain... ...and_ _in a different time, Sans dodged magic attacks from a yellow flower that snarled curse words at him with a squeaky cereal-mascot voice, which was hilarious aside from the part where, two time-loops later, it went back and am_ bush _ed him in his room before he even knew it existed... ...and Frisk gasped in agony as an energy spear punched through their gut, and then they were fourteen years old and asking Undyne not to tell Toriel that they'd been slipping out to visit Asgore, knowing how their mom still mistrusted him..._ _...and two little skeletons were following a willowy monster through a sunlit laboratory... ...and Alphys was having a total anxiety attack over passing her "bad genes" onto the baby after Undyne wondered out loud if they might need glasses, except there wasn't a baby and there was never going to be one, because Undyne had just shattered her spine tackling the human off the bridge, except_ that _didn't m_ _atter either because the human died and time RELOADed... ...and Papyrus was telling Sans all about his "cool hangout" with the human and how impressed they were with his action figures and racecar bed; later, when Sans met with the kid_ _in a deserted, fancy restaurant, he asked them why they were so determined to get back to the surface, and they munched lukewarm fries and ripped the takeout bag into greasy confetti and pretended not to hear; looking back on that conversation as an adult, they confirmed his suspicion that they hadn't known why, either... ...and_ _then they'd collapsed on the bridge in Waterfall, twenty years earlier, bleeding to death, while a nameless monster stared up at the ceiling lights through the grating over its tank...)_

The palms of her hands were extra slimy. Undyne cracked her eye open and the world wobbled back into existence, all soft and unfocused. Hovering in the air in front of her, in golden letters as bright and sharp as knives, was a word, and beside it, an almost-word:

**[̸ ̢ŖELOAD̵ ]̡     ̧͠[̴̴͢ ~~̢̛͘͟͠R̷̶ _E̶͜S҉_ E̛͏͜҉T̴̸̛͢ ̛~~]̨͢**

Her fingers drifted up to graze the letters. If she wanted, she could go back to before that kid showed up at Gerson's house to humiliate her. She could start this whole day over, and nobody would ever know.

With a sigh, she dropped her hand. If Sans' memories were to be believed, too many RELOADs in a row did funny things to people's heads, left behind the distorted afterimages of what had been erased—and anyway, what she really wanted was to erase it from her own memory, which was exactly how her new superpower _didn't_ work. Along with not letting her go back far enough to stop Frisk from abusing _their_ power, or save anyone's lives, or save _herself_ from Alphys' idea of "helping". According to Sans, doing that stuff would've just set off some kind of paradox, but she didn't care. She could've figured it out, somehow.

The letters faded.

Undyne slouched into the wall and rubbed her hand, finding that the punctures had healed while she was distracted. She still felt a twinge of remorse. "S...ans..? Hey?"

Mist drifted up from the falling water at the cave entrance. Undyne looked out at it for a while. _Look on the bright side,_ she eventually thought, scratching absently under the empty socket where her left eye had been. She'd lost it so long ago that she barely remembered what binocular vision felt like. _Now that you're dead, you NEVER have to pay off your tab at Grillby's._

If Sans were listening but just sulking, that should have at least gotten a snicker out of him. Maybe he'd gone to sleep.

"...Screw you... too... then," Undyne said aloud, without much feeling.

She sighed again. Kept staring out at the water. She should really head back to the house, she knew, but she wasn't looking forward to whatever Gerson would have to say about her throwing a kid into a wall. And she wasn't looking forward to what the kid might do or say, either; in a few days, a whole swarm might show up at the front porch to ogle, or get the new royal guard to arrest her, or something. She could always RELOAD to avoid any unwanted visitors, if she cared enough to bother, but that wasn't going to be a permanent solution. If one random Whimsun could track her down, then anyone could... though, with all the cameras installed throughout Waterfall, the _real_ surprise was that Alphys hadn't found her already.

...Alphys. _Alphys_.

In all the time Undyne had wasted, lying around like a pathetic blob and hating herself, Alphys had been injecting monsters with Determination. What was happening to them all? That Whimsun had talked (well, written) about it like it was the most normal thing in the world, but maybe they'd just gotten lucky. If they were fragile enough to Fall Down at such an early age, maybe their family was afraid to burden them with survivor's guilt by telling them what happened to everyone else Alphys had used as a test subject. Maybe something miserable was _going_ to happen, and it just hadn't yet. In the old world, Alphys only told everyone about the monsters in the true lab after the barrier broke, so it was possible that nobody knew the truth about those experiments this time around. Sans knew all along, didn't he?

But that didn't make sense. Alphys herself knew what had happened to those monsters, and she knew _damn well_ what she'd turned Undyne into, and what had happened to Sans as a result. So what did she think she was doing? What was _wrong_ with her?

Undyne hugged herself, but it didn't help much. Her soggy clothes clung flat to her thin, filmy skin, sapping away all her body heat.

At first, she'd thought that she just didn't know how to feel about Alphys anymore. In the old world, they'd been together long enough to settle down and have a kid and watch them reach adulthood, and this time, Alphys had locked her in a fish tank as a science experiment, and if there existed a more legitimate reason to have mixed feelings about a person, then that was news to her. But her memories of other people were warped and tainted, too—Papyrus, Asgore, Yuuya, even the humans on the surface who she'd slowly learned to befriend. She was angry about what happened to them, sure, but only because they were _hers_ , and Frisk took them away for no reason; she didn't really _miss_ anyone, no matter how she poked and prodded at her memories of them, like a bad tooth, trying to make them hurt worse. Maybe, if she could still feel all these emotions, then she'd know exactly how to feel about Alphys. But she couldn't. And she didn't. So she mostly avoided thinking about her at all.

"...Dammit," Undyne mumbled, to nobody except herself.

Because she knew it didn't matter how she felt, or didn't feel. She'd been the captain of the royal guard, once, and it was her job to protect monsterkind—a task she'd failed to accomplish when she died. And then she failed everyone again by wasting her time buried under a blanket or lurking in the back of Gerson's shop, dreaming of revenge against an enemy she couldn't reach. And she was failing right now, sitting here in this little cave, doing nothing to help anyone.

"...Stupid... freaking... Whimsun," she added.

But she still got up, wet and shivering and uncomfortable, and after a long pause, she dragged herself back out through the waterfall. That kid was going to get what they'd wanted from her, after all.

...Or... not.

* * *

Sunlight streamed through the barrier, through the stained glass, down to the mirror-polished floor of the golden hall. Undyne's shadow stretched out behind her. Her bare feet left two slimy gray puddles on the marble.

( _"And, considering what you've done..." Sans intoned, "...what will you do now?"_

 _The human stared daggers, hating him with a desperate, personal intensity. Sans looked out at the trail of small, dusty footprints they'd tracked through the hall, and ran his phalanges over the folded edge of the photo in his pocket_.)

Undyne squinted, turning her head down so her hair would shield her eye from the light. She hadn't bothered going back to the house for a change of clothes, and the tiny part of her that still possessed a scrap of dignity was recoiling in disgust. She must've looked like something that crawled out of a sewer.

The back of her neck tingled as if she were being watched.

_what's the plan, boss?_

Completely ignoring Sans wasn't a great option, so she settled for choosing not to acknowledge him, pouring all her concentration into the act of moving one foot in front of the other, as if she were trying to cross a frozen river. Whatever she looked like, she wasn't going to let Alphys see her wobbling around like a pitiful baby deer.

( _"Whoa! L-look!" Alphys whispered, pulling Undyne's hand. A deer—a real one, not just a deer monster—swiveled an ear in their direction, then bolted into the undergrowth._ )

She made it to the top of the stairs just as her legs decided they'd had enough and buckled, forcing her to grab the railing for support before she could hit the floor. Undyne breathed deep and watched the golden letters— _RELOAD_ —shimmering at the edge of vision. She shook her head and refocused on her surroundings. It felt a little unreal, returning to the castle; she almost expected Asgore to appear around the corner and sweep her up in a big, furry hug, or offer tea, the way he did the last time she was here, before Frisk came back.

...Asgore wasn't here anymore. Sans had been at the funeral, just like everyone else. He'd watched the king's dust being spread across the garden.

"Alphys?"

The railing creaked as she released her grip. Coughing into her sleeve to try and clear her throat, she called out louder. "...Al...phys? You... here?"

No dead boss monsters appeared. And no lizard monsters.

There was no sign of Alphys in the next room over, either, though there was plenty of evidence that she'd  _been_ there. Clusters of empty soda cans stood arranged like bowling pins on the table, next to a pile of little clockwork-looking mechanisms and wires which had all been pushed to the center to make room for a case of screwdrivers and wrenches in all different sizes; a hacksaw, a soldering iron. Undyne poked her head into the kitchen, but found

( _Standing on a kitchen chair to reach over the edge of the counter,_ _Yuuya held a recipe card up to their snout, then selected three eggs from the carton and carefully arranged them in a neat row, pointing end-to-end._

_"What'cha making?" Undyne asked._

_"It's a quiche! Sans got it from her. Um, the recipe, I mean. And Toriel. From her."_

_Even the floor was dusted with flour, as if a miniature snowstorm had recently passed through. That stuff was seriously flammable, but Undyne didn't bother mentioning this fact. Fires were weirdly rare with Yuuya at the helm. "you want help?"_

_"Nope." They cracked the third egg into their bowl and gathered the broken shells into a little stack, leaning over to toss it into the trash. Their tail flicked. "I got thi—"_

_The eggshells flew over the rim of the trash can, splattering cracked shell bits and gooey traces of egg white over the floor._

_"...Gah! Y-you didn't see that!"_ )

nothing, except a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Something inside Undyne ached, but she forgot it as soon as she left to check the bedrooms.

The blankets on Asgore's bed was creased like somebody had slept on top of them— _woulda been a shame not to_ , Sans said—but everything else was undisturbed, even the king's journal sitting open on the table. The kids' room looked more like the kitchen, with a soda can on the nightstand and a laptop plastered with candy-colored anime stickers sitting open on the bed. Sans' blue hoodie hung from a hook on the wall, while on the floor between the beds, a pair of feet in dainty kitten heels protruded from under a white tarp.

"What the..?"

Undyne pushed open the tarp with one foot, standing unsteadily. Underneath was a life-sized humanoid doll with a frilly pink dress and wires spilling out from the neck, its head cradled under one arm like a football with pink pigtails. (And cat ears, which most footballs had.) The doll's other hand grasped a beribboned scepter, though the pink cat face at the top had been swapped out for a hollow, heart-shaped glass bulb. Undyne blinked and dropped the corner of the tarp.

_that's a mew development._

Undyne imagined an audience in a theater, all booing. Up on the imaginary stage, Sans shrugged and winked. His left arm ended in a bloody stump at the elbow; his skull was cracked like a dropped eggshell.

"What... is she... _doing?_ "

_i really, really wish i was in a position to tell you._

Undyne stepped carefully around the doll-robot-catgirl-thing to check the laptop; the screen was dark. There was a clipboard full of handwritten papers sitting next to the computer, some kind of chart, but just glancing at it filled her with

( _"B-but the Temmies are okay! Even the ones that stayed in the village all survived, w-which I wasn't expecting but, obviously it's good news. The human must not have realized they were even there._ "

 _"Mnnhhn." It_ was _good to hear, and not just because of the medicine in her system, which left her feeling all warm and floaty. That part was great too, though. "...Whr're...we?"_

_"Where are we? Um... it's, um..."_

_Alphys launched into a long, winding answer, adjusting the IV line and avoiding eye contact._ _Undyne flexed her fingers, watching dazedly as they melted and dripped onto the mattress._

_By the time her friend had finished speaking, it sank in that this was probably not something that should be happening._

_"...Uh. Alph...ys."_ )

a bad feeling. She didn't touch it.

"Where... is she?"

_unless she's hiding under the bed, not here._

"Gee... thanks." Undyne coughed, her throat seizing up. "Where... would she... usually..." It was easier to keep their thoughts distinct when she spoke out loud, but forming the words took conscious effort, and it had been a while since she'd done it for this long. Gerson gave her funny looks when he noticed her mumbling to herself.

_Where would she normally be right now?_

_in the lab, with you. i guess._

Undyne said nothing to that.

Drawing on Sans' memories, she dug through his hoodie pockets for his phone, but it seemed that Alphys had found it first. Sans felt a flash of relief at knowing his password would be impossible to guess, which turned to fear once he remembered that this was _Alphys_... which turned to apathy once he remembered that he was dead and had no reason to care anymore. Which was great, because Undyne didn't care about whatever secrets he'd been keeping, either.

She limped out to the main room, equal parts restless and tired. Waiting for Alphys to come home was the simplest option, but sitting around doing nothing in the castle wasn't any more useful than sitting around on Gerson's couch. She could keep looking for Sans' phone in hopes that Alphys had left it somewhere, but she doubted she could turn it on and dial without smothering it in goo.

She folded her arms and tried, through the confused patchwork of memories floating through her mind, to remember the face of that moth kid, and their creepy bird... sibling? Right, their sibling. And their notebook. She thought, too, of the other monsters they'd mentioned, who Alphys had injected with Determination. And she thought, too, about a monster floating in a tank, deep in the true lab, hidden away from everyone.

And then she walked out of the castle, and into New Home.


End file.
